Professional Documents
Culture Documents
International History and International Relations 2012
International History and International Relations 2012
HISTORY
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AND
INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS
ANDREW J. WILLIAMS
AMELIA HADFIELD
J. SIMON ROFE
INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AND
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
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Typeset in Garamond
by Cenveo Publisher Services
CONTENTS
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Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
2 War 33
3 Peace 63
4 Sovereignty 95
5 Empire 120
7 Identity 175
Bibliography
Index 202
245
v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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We would like to thank a lot of people who have encouraged us in the writing of
this book. Firstly, thanks to many students who helped us think through our ideas,
and particularly at the universities where we have taught. In addition, and in alpha-
betical order, those who have encouraged us, read parts of the manuscript, given
helpful comments, and in some cases plundered their libraries: Adnan Amkhan,
Zeynep Arkan, Terry Barringer, Jeremy (Ken) Kennard, Tony Lang, Roger Mac
Ginty and Tracey Morris, as well as three anonymous referees from Routledge.
We would also like to thank Craig Fowlie, who never flagged in his faith in the
project even when ours did, and Nicola Parkin from Routledge, who shepherded us
through the editorial process with patience and good humour.
We would in particular like to thank Michael Fry, now Emeritus Professor at
the University of Southern California, with whom Andrew Williams wrote a first
version of part of what is now Chapter 1. Hence, within this chapter pages 20–32
are adapted from Michael Graham Fry and Andrew J. Williams, ‘Diplomatic,
International and Global-World History’, in Jarrod Wiener and Robert A. Schrire
(eds), International Relations, in Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS),
Developed under the Auspices of the UNESCO, EOLSS Publishers, Oxford, UK
(http://www.eolss.net). In turn we would like to thank EOLSS Publishers for giving
us permission to reproduce some of that original material here.
Finally we would like to thank our respective families, who were their usual
supportive selves while this book took shape. The book is dedicated to Amelia’s
father, Alec Hadfield, who passed away during the final stages of completing the
manuscript and who thoroughly approved of its rationale.
vi
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Introduction
This is a book that originated as a result of ‘customer demand’, but also one that we
consider is genuinely required by students of IR who generally (and rightly) com-
plain that our discipline has become too ahistorical, too self-referential and generally
lacking in ‘roots’. It emerged from an eponymous module at the University
of Kent that was taught by Andrew Williams (who now teaches at the University
of St Andrews), Simon Rofe (who now teaches at the School of Oriental and
African Studies, University of London) and Amelia Hadfield (who now teaches
at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels). It was a very successful module in terms of the
numbers of students who were taught – over three hundred a year for a good
half-dozen years. Many of the ideas generated by the feedback we received from
those students.
What we have tried to do, therefore, is to take a very different approach to
most authors who have written books for IR novices who ‘need some history’. This
is not histoire evénémentiel – i.e. we have not provided a date-based encyclical,
or indeed told many stories. What we have tried to do instead is to write interpreta-
tive essays arranged in thematic chapters that gather together the rich literature in
a number of key areas. This literature includes both classic and contemporary texts
and articles by both historians and IR scholars that we consider take historical
method seriously enough to pass muster. We had lively discussions about which
themes needed to be so treated, and the final choice (given the tremendous
range available) was inevitably somewhat arbitrary. We hope that those
themes chosen – war, peace, sovereignty, empire, international organization and
1
INTRODUCTION
history’ (IH).
This approach is inevitably subjective, but we do not mind that
accusation. The essay is a format that we impose on our students, so why should
we not use it ourselves? The main idea of the book, and the modules for which
we hope it will be adopted, is to stimulate new avenues of approach for the
many who remain baffled by the initially seemingly formless, even frontier-free,
subject that is ‘IR’ and to generate debate about why we are right or wrong in
placing emphases where we do by drawing on the insights of both historians
and historically minded scholars of IR. If we subsequently see essays saying
that ‘Hadfield, Rofe and Williams have totally misjudged the importance of “X”
or “Y” in their analysis of “Z”’, we will be delighted (scholastically at any rate!),
because a dialogue will have begun on the rather fretful relationship between IR
and IH.
We have one advantage over the historian, who may feel that we are not doing a
‘proper’ historical job as regards the organizing principle of the text, an accusation that
will wound slightly but is inevitable, [though it might be asked why IR courses tend
to be more popular and are fuller than ones in ‘straight’ history?]. IR is a young sub-
ject, emerging only after World War I. As Oxford biographer Martin Ceadel has
pointed out, the first real ‘IR’ text, Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion (1910), came
out at a time when there were few ‘think tanks’ on IR – the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace dates from the same year, as does the ‘Round Table’ group, who
dedicated themselves to the promotion and study of the British Commonwealth, as
does the Garton Foundation, a short-lived enterprise (Ceadel, 2009).
The lecturer or student who picks up this book may thus find that it responds to
their needs in ways that are helpful or not, but our aim is to ‘put the history back’
into the initial (and later) stages of any degree programme in IR. It will not entirely
satisfy historians, as we have had to elide and compact huge tracts of writing in
many areas that we consider useful. Equally, it may not entirely satisfy IR theorists
of all stripes, who will cavil at apparent omissions of undoubtedly brilliant insights
into this or that aspect of the field. Drawing on both traditional and eclectic sources,
our main mining has been done in the academic historical literature, including a few
populist works, and (where appropriate) non-standard sources including works of
literature, encouraged by Amelia Hadfield’s own work on national culture and
foreign policy. To understand, say, how naval warfare has been embedded into
the British national consciousness, ignoring the novels of Patrick O’Brien or
2
INTRODUCTION
C. S. Forester would be madness, as would that of the war poets for our under-
standing of World War I.
One of the often-perceived problems of the social sciences is their lack of histori-
cal depth. This is even more so with the social science that we call ‘International
Relations’ – its proponents are less than clear about the need to acknowledge
its historical working background so necessary for self-doubt and reflection. Until
the end of the Cold War, many IR scholars acted as though history’s cycles were
somehow given, that the then presence of an immutable global system governed
by the American–Soviet relationship meant that any ‘history’ had to explain only
how it had arrived at that point. Texts that made sense of the apparent balance
of power, the use of material force to maintain it, the foreign policy and security
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dilemmas it produced, and the high stakes created by nuclear weapons, were thus
essential first stops on any IR101 course; as were the seminal realist foundation
established by E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (Carr, 1939) to the
decision-making axioms of H. J. Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations (Morgenthau,
1948), Robert Jervis’s books on perception and misperception, to the subsequent
structural realist commentaries on the constraints imposed by the system like
Kenneth Waltz’s Man, the State and War (Waltz, 1959) or the administrative con-
straints of imposed by bureaucratic structures in Graham Allison’s ‘Essence of
Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis’ (Allison, 1971).
While all such texts (largely realist in pedigree) have their merits, an in-depth,
nuanced history of the international system and its various iteration was sadly
lacking, which led to some very strange attitudes to the past which are
still evident, especially in the IR academy in the United States. Firmly allied with
the deductivist merits of testing hypotheses against ‘evidence’ rather than an episte-
mology based on verifying the emergence of political ‘facts’ from specific historical
context, a clear attitude to the conscious use of history to shed light on broader
historical patterns and thereby produce a firmer understanding of national interests
cultural attitudes and decision-making was largely lacking.
Instead, axioms of political philosophy and ‘classical theories of IR’ were
either subjected to deductive methodologies or awkwardly subsumed into various
‘inter-paradigm debates’ (Dougherty and Pfaltzgraff, 1971). History, and even the
history of international relations, was relegated to a largely supportive area of
study. Whilst explaining the flaws of past decision-making (e.g. Chamberlain’s
appeasement of Hitler or the ‘failure’ of the League of Nations) were favourite topics,
there was little emphasis on the debates about these ‘lessons’ of history.
Contrast such conservative attitudes to the contemporary high praise lavished
on interwar history revisionists like historian Niall Ferguson, who may have
elicited howls of protest due to his very committed and controversial stance on
some issues, but for us represents a very welcome development. It is to be doubted
that he would have had much success had he published twenty years earlier; it is
generally in times of major change and upheaval, like the present, that such histori-
cal iconoclasm can have its just reward. Since 1991, considerable light and air
has been let into the historical vacuum that was 1980s IR. There has also been a
resurgence in what is often called ‘normative’ theory, not just moral philosophy,
but also such esoteric areas as ‘bio-politics’, which in effect resurrect much older
3
INTRODUCTION
historical debates about the relationships between states and individuals, and indi-
viduals with each other. ‘Classical’ IR theory has been relaunched, often through
such historical / legal frameworks as the ‘English School’ (Dunne, 1998), but also in
the form of intellectual biographies (good examples are Ashworth, 1999; Ceadel,
2009). World history, and even ‘detail’ history, has made big inroads into IR confer-
ences, not only through such subsections of the British International Studies
Association as the British International History Group, but also through transatlan-
tic cooperation, encouraging many more to think about what the Annales would
have called ‘les forces profondes’ (Ferguson, 2008; Lebow, 2008). It is nonetheless true
that a CV loaded with history articles or political theory will meet with a frosty
reception in most American IR departments, where the behaviourist revolution of
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the 1970s has never stopped. History may have made an emphatic comeback in the
UK in IR departments, but not yet in the USA (Hadfield and Hudson, 2012).
As many historians have pointed out, it depends what you are looking for in
order to determine what you find or think you have found. The dangers of what
C. Wright Mills called a ‘trans-historical straight jacket’ (Wright-Mills, 1959,
quoted by Skinner, 1985: 3) is particularly evident in many kinds of historical (and
sociological) writing. To find, for example, evidence of ‘class warfare’ or the ‘domi-
nance of elites’ as the driving force of history is very seductive but fundamentally
flawed. In an excellent introductory historical text to the twentieth century,
Richard Vinen points out that ‘[m]ost educated Europeans or North Americans
probably know more about the couple of dozen people who lived around Gordon
Square in Bloomsbury in the first decade of the twentieth century than they
do about the whole population of, say, Serbia during the same period’ (Vinen,
2002: 13).
This micro-focus on details of history sees ‘agency’, the particular role of indi-
vidual actors and groups, even nations, as much more important than what the
French historian Pierre Renouvin called ‘les forces profondes’. As the social theorist
Quentin Skinner puts it, the French Annales school of historians were reacting
against the 1930s prevailing ‘cult of the detail … distinguished above all by a view
of human experience in which the individual agent and individual occurrence cease
to be the central elements in social explanation … it follows that the historians’ time
cannot be that of the linear narrative and his interest cannot be limited by the
merely political’ (Skinner, 1985: 180).
So history gives us a series of alternative explanations for everything; it cannot
be strait-jacketed. That replicates exactly the Zeitgeist of the first decade of the
twenty-first century. In time-honoured Chinese formulation, crisis gives us danger
and opportunity; or, as per Antonio Gramsci’s equally well-known maxim, ‘History
is at once freedom and necessity’ (1971: 782). It is one of the underlying homilies
of this book that contemporary IR must not only embrace the challenges of
uncertainty through a retreat into clerical obscurantism, but also through a neces-
sary exploration of the many diverse interpretations that the study of history opens
up to us all.
The chapters in this book are therefore essays in the sense that we do not claim
that the understanding of history we will present is the only possible one. We may
not quite take the view, as Hilaire Belloc put it, that ‘History is a matter of flair
4
INTRODUCTION
rather than of facts’, but the ‘ability to feel [oneself ] into the past’ is one that we
feel to be an essential factor in and for IR training. Belloc’s intellectual itinerary
illustrates that his formulation can also lead to obscurantism of a different sort –
in the case of Belloc and his associates, like Cecil and G. K. Chesterton, it led to
some inspired observations about Western civilization but also, it must be said, to
a repugnant anti-Semitism (Wilson, 1998: 13). However, we do believe that the
essential element that is often missing in much of IR and is mainly to be found in
the study of history is the sheer excitement of discovering multiple layers of meaning
and action that need no mediating ‘theory’ or cleric to unwrap.
Each of these essays is thus unashamedly a personal and collective meditation on
evidence that we have explored in archives, biographies and histories spanning many
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centuries. They are intended not to provide definitive answers to any of the issues
raised, but rather to stimulate undergraduate students of IR to undertake the same
kind of legwork that we have. As examined in Chapter 1, the ‘cardinal concepts’
around which this book is organized each give examples of the depth of historical
circumstance by which key ideas are constructed over time into both political prac-
tice and cultural attitudes. IR, however, has a tendency to regard concepts like war,
peace and sovereignty merely as organizing or attitudinal categories of behaviour
rather than vastly challenging multi-layered social concepts. Simply because they
exist in crystallized form as a ‘self-evident’ concept, or even a historical ‘fact’, does
not mean they should be treated as unchanging abstract categories. Thus, to read
history as merely the background leitmotiv of IR textbooks is to miss out on one of
life’s great adventures. We will, where we can, give a series of different questions and
tentative answers which historians, and historically minded scholars of IR (of which
there are many since 1991 or so), should find useful. Nonetheless we do not pretend
to be all-encompassing in our analysis and in the sources used (to do so would be
impossible), but rather to stimulate debates from seminars to bars, wherever IR is
taught. (Note: Some of the chapters use the expression ‘q.v.’ to indicate where a
concept is used elsewhere in the book.)
Chapter 1 will primarily look at the extensive literature that exists to explain
how the approaches taken by historians regarding the nature of history, and what
constitutes ‘historical enquiry’, vary greatly from those taken by students of IR.
After investigating both gaps and overlaps between the methods of historical enquiry
and those of political science, the chapter concludes by examining the various
schools of thought within the history profession – especially ‘diplomatic’, ‘interna-
tional’, ‘global’ and ‘transnational’ schools – that presently have much to teach the
IR profession.
Chapter 2, ‘War’, looks at some of the incredibly rich historical literature on
the causes, waging and consequences of war from the Roman Empire to the end
of the modern era. It inevitably puts particular stress on the major conflicts of the
twentieth century but aspires to show the antecedents in a more detailed light than
is usually the case in IR textbooks. It also aims to show that war is as much a cultural
as a military phenomenon, and one where we often refer to cultural concepts as
‘honour’ without fully realizing to what we allude. As with other chapters, there
is some reference to the ‘classical’ IR literature to show how some scholars have
demonstrated a keen historical imagination.
5
INTRODUCTION
6
CHAPTER 1
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The studious examination of the past in the greatest of detail does not teach you much
about the mind of History; it only gives you the illusion of understanding it.
(Taleb, 2007: 11)
When it comes to understanding the past, historians are the acknowledged experts.
But when it comes to understanding how we understand the past, there are no experts.
(Martin, 1993: 31)
INTRODUCTION
The central task of this book is to show how the discipline of history can be of
cardinal use to the student of international relations (IR). While many IR scholars
know they ‘ought to take history seriously’, they are also loath to do so. Are not
historians prone to studying ‘what one [foreign office] clerk said to another?’ or
to looking at extremely narrow areas of a state’s activities, such as how Lord
Lansdowne (British Foreign Secretary, 1900–1905) helped negotiate the Anglo-
French Entente Cordiale in 1904 or how Sir Edward Grey (British Foreign Secretary,
1905–1916) got Britain involved in World War I? Such attention to detail has
the effect on many IR scholars of inducing enormous self-doubt or overweening
arrogance and disdain in equal measure. How could anyone possibly be interested
in such ephemera when we have such huge problems as ‘agency and structure’ or
‘hegemony’ to worry about? Many IR colleagues would complain that not only was
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
all that history ‘a very long time ago’, but they would also be unclear as to how
or why we should care about it. So many of the judgements made by IR scholars
rest squarely on the giant shoulders of diplomatic international historians like
F. H. Hinsley and countless others who did the spade work in the archives so
that they might draw their broad conclusions, and even founded entire theoretical
dynasties on such ‘obscure’ work.
Acknowledging IR’s debt to international history is a rarity. The great classical
realist scholar Hans Morgenthau never denied his immense debt to his international
and diplomatic historian colleagues. As we will see below, the ‘English School’ of
IR theorists were either primarily historians (Herbert Butterfield being maybe the
best example; see Dunne, 1998) or were overtly beholden unto them. So there
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should not be any problem with admitting historians into departments of IR, or for
historians to accept those who (sometimes) play fast and loose with their scholarship
to draw ‘big picture’ conclusions. This chapter illustrates how close the various
schools of history that deal with the ‘international’ are to the key concerns of
scholars of IR. After a study of ‘diplomatic’ and ‘international’ history, it shows that
with recent developments like ‘world’ and ‘transnational’ history we are now begin-
ning to acknowledge each other’s presence in a less mutually hostile way and accept
the reality of a cross-fertilization of what should never have been divided – history
and IR.
HISTORY UNCOVERED
First, a brief word about history itself. As we said in the Introduction, history com-
prises both a chronology of past events and a scholarly method of enquiry as to the
nature of those past events. Historical enquiry itself has something of a ‘history’.
Commentators upon history are almost as venerable as the very events themselves.
Over time they have taken various guises, depending on their role in recording
or interpreting past events, from scribes and philosophers, to emissaries, politicians
and professional historians. Our study recognizes nineteenth-century German his-
toricism as dating the emergence of professional scholarly enquiry. This school
included eminent philosophers and historians (including Michelet, Burckhardt
and Fustel) who argued that history’s purpose was to ‘strive to understand each
age in its own terms’ and to bend both scholarship and imagination to ‘the task
of bringing the past back to life – or resurrecting it’ (Tosh, 2009: 7). The Berlin uni-
versity professor Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) was foremost in the pantheon
of historians seeking accuracy, description and completeness to explain, but also
to thoroughly understand all aspects of a given historical event. Understanding, as
in a high empathetic connection with past occurrences, loosely translated from
German as verstehen, remains a key (if slightly antiquated principle) of contempo-
rary historical enquiry.
Two things separate Ranke from later generations. First was Ranke’s belief in
the historian’s overall ability to uncover history ‘as it really was’ (Wie es eigentlich
gewesen [ist]), by believing that historical material comprised both verifiable and
objective ‘facts’. Second was his refusal to extend historical enquiry to the service
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
of politics. His central criticism of earlier historians (and which applies to a swath
who followed) was ‘that they were diverted from the real task by the desire to preach,
or to give lessons in statecraft … in pursuing immediate goals they obscured the true
wisdom to be derived from historical study’ (Tosh, 2009: 8).
E. H. Carr’s seminal work of 1961, What is History?, represents a watershed
of early twentieth-century enquiry. In it, Carr suggested simply that no fact can be
entirely value-free; it is always filtered through the interpretive forces of the original
epoch, and again by the biases of the contemporary historian (Carr, 1961). A robust
rejection of such relativist perspectives (i.e. that history is a product of its own time)
then followed with G.R. Elton’s 1967 The Practice of History, which not only cham-
pioned the central role of objective truth about past events but argued that official
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documentary records (rather than other varied sources) comprised the best possible
source of data. Philosopher Michael Oakeshott presaged the postmodernist wave
that would shake historical enquiry to its foundations, and turned the tables once
again by arguing not only the ‘absolute impossibility of deriving from history any
generalization of the kind which belong to a social science’ (Oakeshott, 1990, quoted
in Levy, 1997: 24), but criticizing any attempt at remaining objective in the face of
historical ‘facts’. From this perspective, any attempt to study or ‘write’ history was
not only deeply interpretive but an exercise in remaking it once again from a differ-
ent perspective, a process that ultimately renders history as ‘a historian’s experience’
rather than something objectively verifiable (Oakeshott, 1990: 99, quoted in Levy,
1997: 26). Yet for many, total relativism was frivolous at best and dangerous at
worst. Deconstructive trends would, in the eyes of Raphael Samuel, reduce history
to fanciful storytelling, ‘an invention, or fiction, of historians themselves’ (in Evans,
1997: 7).
For those at either end of this broad and argumentative objectivist–relativist spec-
trum, the goal is ultimately still one of understanding the forces that explain events.
This exercise is now a balancing act between the conscious cultivation of the mind-
set of a given historical era to accurately understand both the opportunities and
constraints entailed in a given circumstance and an awareness that such cultivation
prejudices both the historian’s objectivity and end results.
Other key features mark out contemporary historical enquiry; Tosh, for example,
suggests three principles that could guide such enquiry. First, the recognition
of implicit difference created by the passage of time between the present day and
the era under investigation. Thus one may identify the past, but avoid
identifying with it to prevent ‘the unthinking assumption that people in the past
behaved and thought as we do … the difference is one of mentality: earlier
generations had different values, priorities, fears and hopes from our own’ (Tosh,
2009: 9). Second, the context or accompanying information surrounding a
given event or actor, which requires a rigorous effort on the part of the historian to
place events accurately in their historical settings. Third, process, in which singular
events – generally, the key focus of historians – are also appreciated as part of a
wider chronological fabric. Developing a point first made by Fernand Braudel,
Tosh suggests that this process is the ‘relationship between events over time
which endows them with more significance than if they were viewed in isolation’
(Tosh, 2009: 11).
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
The point of this chapter is not to suggest that historical enquiry is itself a
perfect scholarly art, or that the various generations of historical enquiry
represent increasingly refined approaches. Historical enquiry is in some sense as
precarious as political science, for two reasons. First, like political science,
historical enquiry is a conglomerate discipline, one which has ‘profited immeasur-
ably from the invasions of neighbouring disciplines’ including sociology, psychol-
ogy, economics, anthropology and more (Evans, 1997: 8). Second, history –
like political science – is in the business of selection and interpretation of past
events (sometimes for present expediencies). As Braudel argued, ‘All historical
work is concerned with breaking down time past, choosing among its chronological
realities according to more or less conscious preferences and exclusions’
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(Braudel, 1980: 27). Historical enquiry is thus selective in both the disciplines
from which it can choose its raw material and the methodology by which it can
choose to fashion its tools. In political science, however, the prime error is
the ongoing failure to recognize difference, context or process. Its tendency instead
is to create generalizations that compress past and present, rendering them similar
in outlook; to remove or neglect key contextual details as extraneous; to see
connecting dynamics merely from the requirement to discern broad and repeating
patterns.
The ‘cardinal concepts’ around which this book is organized give examples of the
depth of historical circumstance by which key ideas are fashioned across the genera-
tions into both political practice and attitudes. IR, however, has a tendency to regard
concepts like war, peace and sovereignty as organizing or attitudinal categories of
behaviour rather than multi-layered social concepts. Simply because they exist in
crystallized form as concepts does not mean they should be treated as unchanging
abstract categories.
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
book represents a detailed examination of the historicist ethos that largely informed
the Second Great Debate.
The Second Great Debate pitted vying methodologies against each other.
Scholars who viewed IR as a political science remained committed to the scientific
method in deploying hypotheses, quantitative methodologies and the requirement
to test evidence to look both for generalizations and falsifying examples in an
attempt to render IR a more predictable method of explaining state behaviour.
Historicists keen on understanding the more detailed, bottom-up nuances
dismissed ‘scientific’ approaches in favour of a historicist/interpretative approach
by which the true origins and motivations of behaviour could be legitimately
discerned.
The inter-paradigm debate that arose in the 1980s and 1990s involved a pro-
tracted debate between a wide variety of realist and liberal/institutionalist schools
of thought as well as a range of emerging radical, poststructural IR theories.
Where the Second Great Debate featured spats over methodology, arguments
over suitable epistemologies characterized the Fourth Great Debate, pitting ratio-
nalist positivist theories against reflectivist post-positivist IR theories.
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
profound as it may seem. As Stephen Haber, David Kennedy and Stephen Krasner
suggest:
Historians who study diplomatic history and political scientists who study
international politics, despite some genuine differences, have always been engaged
in a similar enterprise … What is most notable about diplomatic history
and international relations theory are not their differences, but their similarities
with regard to subject matter, and in the end, commitment to objective
evidence.
(Haber, Kennedy and Krasner, 1997: 34)
The development of political science and key aspects of IR theory owes much to
the material uncovered and structured by diplomatic historians. Haber, Kennedy
and Krasner have all accepted they are ‘brothers under the skin’ (Haber, Kennedy
and Krasner, 1997). Other IR scholars that have successfully bridged the gap include
Peter Katzenstein and J. G. Ruggie. The majority of contemporary diplomatic
historians in turn have worked in the service of some policy agenda. American
historians, in particular, ‘emerged to shoulder the burden of convincing Americans
that they had a stake in the Great War, and beyond it, in the long-term operation
of the international system’ (Haber, Kennedy and Krasner, 1997: 38), while anti-
Vietnam and Cold War debates have animated subsequent diplomatic history.
The post-Cold War era, however, suggests that diplomatic history has largely
come to an end. In its place are a series of different types of history (as mentioned
above), and the swath of political science approaches (comparative politics, foreign
policy analysis, IR theory, etc.), whose appreciation and treatment of history remains
imperfect. However, this apparent similarity of subject matter should be treated
with some care; it does not assume an automatic foundation upon which to build.
While both sides draw upon the same raw material, history serves three rather
different purposes in terms of what it is explaining, the perception of this feature,
and the method of its use.
First, the key feature to be explained (the ‘what’) are generally singular events
in the history of a person or society; traditional historical research is dedicated to find-
ing the historical data to explain an event in terms of its causes and the changes pro-
duced. They are not usually however, looking at a series of events. Political science,
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
however, looks for cause and effect in terms of collective events that take the form of
patterned behaviour.
Second, the key method of explanation (the ‘how’) for historians are factors
that are wholly and utterly unique to the case at hand. Historians therefore focus
on the particularist motivations explaining both human responses and societal
changes. To explain a general principle of behaviour, political theorists instead look
for broad connecting features by which many causes of change can be grouped
together.
Third, with regards to the various tools employed, historians explain change
by locating a specific, identifiable problem that suffered inattention or misinterpre-
tation, and then assembling the necessary historical evidence to shed further light
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Historians, too, could benefit from a less parochial attitude to their own meth-
ods. G. M. Trevelyan exemplifies an early example of an enduring suspicion among
historians in making generalizations (either quantitatively or qualitatively), arguing
that ‘The generalizations which are the stock-in-trade of the social historian
must necessarily be based on a small number of particular instances … but which
cannot be the whole of the complicated truth’ (Trevelyan, 1944: viii). As Gordon
Craig has similarly argued, historians need to overcome both their ‘congenital mis-
trust of theory’ and their ‘insistence upon the uniqueness of the historical event’,
looking to political science for evidence that one can with some confidence ‘treat
unique cases as members of a class or type of phenomenon … discover correlations
among different variables that may have causal significance’ (Craig, cited by George,
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1997: 47).
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This difference, of course, informs the approach to the content. While political
scientists look for regularities and patterns, historians focus on the ‘richness of
detail and scrupulous fidelity to the individual facts unearthed’ (Schroeder, 1997:
65). Braudel clarified the implications of this distinction as a ‘lively distrust’ on
the part of traditional historians who examine the history of single events with
political history, which examines the drama of ‘great events’ (Braudel, 1980: 28).
The nomothetic approach common to political science data places within a pre-
established conceptual framework, to see how well it proves (or disproves) a given
‘law’ or lawlike generality. Political scientists seek to answer how well data then
explains a given generality. The ideographic approach employed by historians may
well use the same historical data but it operates as building blocks by which to
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reconstruct a particular event or situation. Here, data does not explain external
dynamics, but is the key to understanding as accurately as possible the precise forces
at work in producing a past outcome. This high degree of understanding requires
historians to subsume themselves within the data (rather than transcend it via
abstraction) to the extent that they can quite literally empathize with past perspec-
tives and forces. This allows them to gain the deepest possible connection with the
event or personality under investigation, the process known as Verstehen (described
page 8). Political theorists (and social scientists more broadly) are thus:
SIMILARITIES
The problem with these supposed differences between the two disciplines are the
simplistic, unproblematic assumptions about the approach to knowledge (episte-
mology) and tools (methodology) employed by both political scientists and histori-
ans. First, there are analysts on both sides who have for years made use of perspectives
and tools beyond the mainstream of their own school. Historians necessarily make
use of inference as a result of absent data, while IR theorists (especially in European
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
and British schools) have a good tradition of inductive methods and culturalist epis-
temologies. Indeed, if we take the top-down versus bottom-up perspective too far,
we not only risk them turning into caricatures but assume that such grave differ-
ences will keep both sides permanently at odds – denying history the ability to
obtain the methodological rigour of political science while assuming (perhaps even
encouraging) political scientists to mistreat historical material.
A more nuanced approach suggests that political scientists and historians
actually have three key aspects in common. First, both disciplines are looking for
causes (rather than merely change). Indeed, it is history that has the greatest heritage
in treating causes as the central imperative. As Carr himself famously argued in
his seminal work What is History?, ‘The study of history is a study of causes’ (Carr,
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historians look for much the same things political scientists seek – clear assign-
able causes resting on evidence subject to intersubjective test and verification and
capable of supporting broad, significant generalization and patterns.
(Carr, 1961: 67, emphasis in original)
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
scientists; and that ‘historians’ ideographic orientation does not necessarily imply
that they are atheoretical in their interpretation of singular events’ (Levy, 1997: 25).
Equally compelling is the increase of nomothetic international history in the late
twentieth century in which leading historians use historical material to ‘develop
hypotheses, assign particular causes for events and developments, and establish
general patterns’ (Schroeder, 1997: 66).
Historical writing on political topics as wide-ranging as revolutions, imperialism,
foreign policy, the origins and outcomes of the world wars and the Cold War all
explain their outcomes in terms of discernible patterns and generalizations, and do
in terms of generalizations about political behaviour. Overlaps regarding methodol-
ogy now feature to increase the interdisciplinary dialogue. For instance, the increased
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
distinction. The result for contemporary historians has been a healthy profusion of
myriad strands of enquiry: social, cultural, urban, gender history among others, as
well as area-based histories, all of which arose during the last half of the twentieth
century.
The one exception to this disciplinary blossoming is diplomatic history, which
has remained relatively isolated from methodological trends. As Levy argues,
diplomatic history … has been consistent in its insistence on the empirical vali-
dation of its interpretations and in the utility of narratives and primary sources
for that purpose. In important respects, it has also become more theoretical in the
last couple of decades. Some historians are quite explicit about the analytical
assumptions and theoretical models that guide their historical interpretations …
Some historians are not only quite conversant with international relations
theory or other social science theories, but have made important contributions
to the theoretical literature, either by constructing theoretical generalizations or
by contributing to debates on the methodology of international relations
research.
(Levy, 1997: 29)
Levy points to the work of Paul Schroeder (examined above), John Lewis Gaddis,
Arno J. Mayer and Fritz Fischer as leading lights in interdisciplinary advances
(Schroeder, 1997; Levy, 1997; Gaddis, 1986). In ‘History, Science and the Study
of IR’ (in Woods, 1996), for example, Gaddis outlines how and why IR depends
upon both the memory and methodology distilled from historical enquiry. Equally
pertinent is the broader point made by Kavanagh in ‘Why Political Science Needs
History’ (1991). Taken together, we find a quiet, contemporary current of scholars
aware of the mutually reinforcing (and ultimately, indeed, co-constitutive) nature of
history, political science and IR theory.
If we regard diplomatic history as the centerpiece for IR’s raw material, the result
is something of a perfect storm. Enlightened IR scholars have intersubjective tools
at their disposal to explore ideographic forces, and a minority of historians have
reinforced the theoretical backbone of diplomatic history, revealing the area to be
highly conducive to both forms of analytic and narrative treatment. This is a good
start, but it still does not equate to the overdue requirement for greater appreciation
and use of history by IR scholars themselves. Whilst the perfect storm has yielded
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
TABLE 1.1
Historian Function of history Implication for the discipline Implication for political science
of history
objective determinism and the bottomless pit of subjective relativity’, asking only
questions instead of providing answers (Carr, 1953: xiii). His later viewpoint,
however, was more optimistic; namely, that both sides ‘are engaged in different
branches of the same study: the study of man and his environment’ and, while the
methods differ, both ‘are united in the fundamental purpose of seeking to explain,
and in the fundamental procedure of question and answer’ (Carr, 1953: 80).
DIPLOMATIC HISTORY
From the problems posed by the study of history in general and how it differs
from the study of political science, we now turn to the subfields of how the ‘interna-
tional’ has been understood by various groups of historians. This is important, as
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Diplomatic historians set themselves two tasks – first, to understand how governing
elites, in unitary states, generally free of popular forces, assessed risk, did the
capabilities–goals analysis and constructed foreign policy; and second, to under-
stand the behaviour of states and how they interacted with one another, i.e. state-
craft. Great men ran the affairs of great powers and managed interstate conflict.
Diplomatic history’s issue areas were, therefore, essentially political and strategic,
expressed in terms of security, national interest and great strategy. Its principal con-
cerns were war and its origins, peace and its restoration, crises, alliance relationships
and the sanctity of treaties. The sum of great power foreign policies constituted
international relations, there being, therefore, no discrete international system.
Governments dealt with other governments and scarcely at all with oppositions, or
alternative, aspirant governments.
Diplomatic historians employed a methodology that rested on textual analysis
of primary sources – manuscript and printed – preserved primarily in government
archives. When bolstered by the record of public debate, in speeches, parliaments
and the press, the archives were taken to reveal elite reasoning and state behaviour.
Command of the archives, public and private, domestic and foreign, placing a pre-
mium on foreign language skills, identified the master craftsmen: Sir Charles
Webster, William Langer and J. B. Duroselle, for example. Cumulation was deter-
mined more by the availability of primary sources (the opening of archives, often
to serve political as much as scholarly purposes) than by puzzlement. Diplomatic
historians wrote dense, analytical narratives chronologically, in a common vocabu-
lary. They ranged over the historical record from classical times, and particularly
from the Renaissance to what became their principal focus – the modern, industrial-
ized, national security state. Historiography took on the familiar pattern of ortho-
doxy, revisionism and post-revisionism.
Diplomatic history gathered momentum in the late nineteenth century and
flourished in the first half of the twentieth. World War I, total or not, but of unprec-
edented proportions and reach, required understanding – of its origins, causes,
eruption, prolongation and consequences. So did the questions surrounding the
peacemaking of 1919–1923. The ‘War Guilt’ clause of the Versailles Treaty, i.e.
Article 231, written to justify the collection of reparations from Germany, stimu-
lated scholarship, only to render much of it seemingly sterile by turning diplomatic
history into a quasi-judicial process and historians into apologists and axe-grinders,
waging scholarly war over war guilt. Luigi Albertini’s monumental volumes marked
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
the virtual end of the affair. The Nazi record, and that of imperial Japan, and the
verdicts of Nuremberg and Tokyo, exempted World War II from a repetition.
Orthodoxy, richly documented as the thirty-year rule became the norm, ruled.
Revisionism in the 1960s, such as that attempted by A. J. P. Taylor, seemed eccen-
tric, even perverse. The debate, such as it was, was short-lived. And diplomatic
historians played an embarrassingly small role in the examination of the origins and
course of the Cold War.
INTERNATIONAL HISTORY
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Diplomatic history continues to be written. Yet the term ‘diplomatic history’ has
largely given way to the term ‘international history’. It was not a case of diplomatic
history ending in a particular decade and international history beginning, but rather,
in the shadow of World War I, of the latter developing alongside the former and
then, after World War II, rapidly outgrowing and displacing it. One can trace the
process in several distinguished careers – those of Christopher Thorne, Fritz Fischer,
Ernest May, Paul Kennedy and Donald C. Watt, for example. Self-examination and
growth occurred in an environment that had turned hostile toward diplomatic his-
tory, in a history profession that was moving decisively in other directions. Diplomatic
history was condemned as narrow, stagnant, impoverished, old-fashioned and ulti-
mately irrelevant. The tides of historical scholarship were rising on other shores, the
currents flowed in different channels, leaving diplomatic historians, derided as naive
positivists, arid instrumentalists, lacking new frontiers of enquiry, to drown in their
own deservedly obscure monographs. Social, economic, cultural, intellectual and
new political historians scoffed at those who waited for the pendulum of relevance
to swing back towards them. It never did.
International historians did not join frontally in the assault. Rather, they built
on the considerable and enduring accomplishments of diplomatic history. The
classical realist paradigm, maintaining a role for elites and agency and links with
biography, had much to commend it, even as annalism and structural realism had
their day. The state, being transformed conceptually, retained its centrality; its
relations with other states and entities that were not states could not sensibly be
relegated to the margins of enquiry. Politics and strategy, the security dilemma,
held their relevance if not their primacy, assisted by a revival of military history.
International historians played, therefore, a central role in the development of intel-
ligence studies. Alternative, contending paradigms – idealist, progressive, radical,
New Left and Marxist – had to be tested, inescapably, against classical realism.
W. N. Medlicott, for example, in the introduction to his Bismarck, Gladstone and
the Concert of Europe (1956), joined the realist–idealist debate. Diplomatic history’s
scrupulous empiricism and analytical narratives set standards that case-study
writers did not emulate. Diplomatic history will always remind the international
relations community not only of the relevance of statesmen, their beliefs, values,
perceptions and information processing, but also that their understanding, the fruits
of praxis, must be placed alongside the outpourings of theorists. After all, Woodrow
Wilson, in his Fourteen Points, issued on 8 January 1918, set out the liberal
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
interpretation of the causes of the Great War. Belatedly, political scientists are calling
for ‘Bringing the statesman back in’ (Byman and Pollack, 2001).
From those foundations international historians selectively, even sceptically,
found common ground with those who had flogged diplomatic history, i.e. princi-
pally economic, intellectual, cultural, new political and social historians (Joll, 1968;
Cowling, 1971, 1975; Bentley, 1977), and with those who wrote business and
institutional history. They also began to draw, equally selectively, even more scepti-
cally, on the social sciences, principally economics, politics, anthropology, sociology,
psychology and that intellectual conglomerate, international relations. The results
are impressive, if uneven and controversial.
First, and providing a decisive normative foundation, there emerged what can
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the attainment of peace is not as easy as the desire for it … Those ages, which
in retrospect seem most peaceful, were least in search of peace … Whenever
peace – conceived as the avoidance of war – has been the primary objective of a
power or a group of powers, the international system has been at the mercy of the
most ruthless member of the international community … Stability, then, has
commonly resulted not from a quest for peace but from a generally accepted
legitimacy.
(Kissinger, 1964: 1)
During and after World War II, Carr modified his previous view that cooperation
between states was impossible, as he took his ‘left turn’ and became a strong sup-
porter of the Soviet Union and advocated a generous settlement with Germany
in his Conditions of Peace (1942) and Nationalism and After (1945), as well as the
frankly pro-Soviet, the impressive History of Soviet Russia (1950–1978, 14 vols),
which has been authoritatively praised and condemned in equal measure (with
Isaac Deutscher, A. J. P. Taylor and Eric Hobsbawm in the ‘pro’ camp, and Robert
Conquest, Richard Pipes and Hugh Trevor-Roper in the ‘anti’) – some sort of
measure of greatness. Carr’s importance to the study of international relations,
sometimes crassly confined to a reading of The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939), has in
recent years been recognized as immense, with a plethora of excellent biographies
and collected essays (most notably by Haslam, 1999, 193; Jones, 1998; Cox, 2000).
Maybe the most important lesson of Carr has been to confound the often watertight
division between ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’ that was at one time seen to dominate the
‘inter-paradigm debate’ (Ashworth, 2002).
World War I provided the framework within which thinking was stimulated
about the causes of war and its prevention in the future. Slavery was, in the
nineteenth century, the great moral evil; war replaced it in the twentieth century.
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
a pacificistic bias (Ceadel, 1980, 1987, 1996; Morefield, 2005), which E.H. Carr
characterized as idealist or utopian. The consensus was extended, nevertheless,
to what seemed equally indispensable as the avoidance of war, i.e. the maintenance,
the defence of liberal democracy. Quincy Wright’s seminal Limitation of Armament
(1921), The Causes of War and the Conditions of Peace (1935) and A Study of
War (1942) demonstrated, however, that liberals and utopians were not alone in
grappling with the problem of providing security for the democracies. After World
War II, an important school of rather conservative international historians took
up the interwar trend of international history writing, though not in the liberal
pacificistic mode of Zimmern, Murray and Dickinson. This saw its most important
development both for international history and IR in the ‘English school’, which
stressed the emergence of an ‘international society’ (Dunne, 1998, 2005). Key
among this ‘school’ were Charles Manning and Martin Wight (Porter and Wight,
1992; Dunne, 1999), who were all dominant figures at the London School of
Economics. The volume of this school that has had the most longevity on IR read-
ing lists is undoubtedly Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society (1977/2002).
Those statesmen who constructed the 1919 peace settlement came, predictably,
under attack from activists and historians. Woodrow Wilson was excoriated even
more comprehensively than either David Lloyd George or Georges Clemenceau.
The assaults mounted, as what were hoped to be the postwar years became, in the
course of a twenty-year armistice, the interwar years. So did the counterattacks,
led, in all his self-righteous indignation and his callousness, by Lloyd George (1932,
1938: see also Fry, 1977, 2011). He destroyed reputations in index entries.
Peacemaking that did not contribute to the prevention of future wars and was judged
actually to have made them more likely was examined almost as prodigiously as
war itself (Lentin, 1984; Sharp, 1991; as well as, in French, Weill-Raynal, 1947).
There was no doubting the seminal importance of World War I and the peacemak-
ing at Versailles. Kissinger (1994), for example, came to see the debate on the
Versailles Treaty of 1919 as defining US attitudes toward the world. Osiander
(1994), Williams (1998/2007) and Knutsen (1999) conceptualized the whole period
since 1919 as a quest, led by the United States and the other liberal powers, to
develop a ‘New World Order’ agenda.
Second, international historians began to work within alternative paradigms
to classical realism and thereby contributed to the debate about the potency of
structural realism, idealism and progressive, radical and New Left alternative
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
found a place in their work. Keynes, of course, in his Economic Consequences of the
Peace (1920/2011), and those who followed him if only to reject his arguments
(Mantoux, 1946; Weill-Raynal, 1947; Bunselmayer, 1975; Schuker, 1976;
Trachtenberg, 1980; Kent, 1989), put reparations, war debts, economic policy
and economic transactions in the international system at the centre of debate
over the 1919 Peace Treaty and its consequences. Knock’s (1992) biography of
Woodrow Wilson demonstrated how international history could draw on the
history of ideas. International historians, perforce, worked with a richer haul
of concepts, beyond national interest, coercion and deterrence, including race,
ethnicity, identity, dependence, interdependence, modernization, ideology and
hegemony. International history became, consciously, more comparative
across space, time and cultures, breaking with the focus on, and obsession with,
the European great powers, the United States and Japan, and classical imperialism.
Decolonization, neo-imperialism, north–south and core–periphery relations
and the role of middle and small powers (in Afro-Asia, the Middle East and
Latin America) in the international system drew more, entirely justified,
attention.
Fourth, to make headway in these directions, international historians broke
with the tradition of seeing the international system as the sum of great power
policies and behavior. They recognized that the international system was neither
an abstraction – a scientific metaphor and a ‘metaphysical entity’ – nor merely
a context in which governments operated, but rather ‘a series of intersecting
outcomes not readily deducible from a summing up of individual policies’ (Maier,
1980). Schroeder (1994) led the way in the realm of politics and security, demon-
strating that the international system had dynamic properties, conflictual and
cooperative behaviour; for example, structures and configurations such as distribu-
tions of resources and power, and thus polarities and regimes, and degrees of order.
It also harboured paradox – the power, on occasions, of the weak and the impotence
of the powerful. These developments paralleled the above-mentioned work of
Hedley Bull (1977/2002), who had started to see states as part of a global system
or even an ‘international society’. It was a short but radical step to turn to the
functioning of economic, cultural, ideological and social international and global
systems and international civil society. Thorne (1985, 1988), addressing social
structure, historical change and international relations, exploring the relation-
ship between social structure and international history, developing a ‘historical
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
international sociology’ (Scholte, 1994), was arguably the most creative in these
‘border crossings’.
Fifth, international historians, as they joined in the redefinition of both state
and power, looked inward to find the societal determinants of foreign policy
that matched the sources and constraints emanating from the international system.
It was a matter of constructing a social framework for foreign policy that demon-
strated the relationships between government, the state and society. They examined
how, in that space between the institutions of government and the boundaries
of society, individuals, groups and the media helped define the nature and purpose
of the state. Policy became an expression of social values and heritage, racial compo-
sition, political texture and economic structure (Kennedy, 1980). Electorates,
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the media, lobbies, pressure and interest graphs, publicists, business and organized
labour wielded influence. Economic interests, political beliefs, values, cultural
norms, intellectual fashion and configurations of power and privilege affected policy
process and outcome. The concept of corporatism, examining the role of organized
economic power blocs in harness with the state, flourished among US international
historians as an analytical approach (Hogan, 1991; Iriye, 1979) described the state
as a cultural system and international relations as interactions between cultural and
power systems.
International historians also began to examine perhaps an equally important
theme – the impact of foreign policy on state and society. Foreign policy became
an independent not a dependent variable, a mechanism to reconcile, or drive
apart, diverse interests and values within a state, and to justify extractions from and
reallocation of resources between various segments of society. Foreign policy could
thus contribute to or detract from political consensus, national unity and social
harmony. International historians played a role, therefore, in the development
of linkage politics, in exploring the reciprocal influences of the international
and domestic spheres, and eroding the sharp distinction between them that had
held up for so long (Fry and Gilbert, 1982). At the same time, international histori-
ans, drawing on institutional history and the social sciences, examined more
thoroughly both bureaucratic and cabinet politics to improve their understanding of
elite decision-making. The composition, organization and functions of foreign min-
istries, treasuries and military establishments mattered (Steiner, 1969; Schulzinger,
1975). Bureaucratic politics, the bargaining and negotiating between government
departments, the Harvard view of Washington, did not travel well, however, beyond
the United States.
These explorations by international historians enabled them to participate in the
examination of three crucial considerations: (1) the nature of power, its economic
and cultural dimensions, and the relations between those who wield or are deprived
of it; (2) the nature of the state, its mediatory role between groups and forces
in society, and its relations, beyond its borders, with states and entities that are
not states; (3) and the relationship between structures, natural and constructed,
economic, social and ideational, and prevailing patterns of authority and subservi-
ence, and agency. In so doing, international historians, wedded to a multi-archival
approach, looked beyond the archives of the state, and beyond agencies of govern-
ment concerned exclusively with political and strategic issues to plural sources from
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
which to construct their data. Their methods evolved, often under the influence
of the social sciences, and beyond the use of oral history techniques and counter-
factual reasoning. Unmatched empirics and implicit theory produced rich historical
tapestries which demonstrated, whatever the patterns and regularities, that inter-
national history is principally the study of uncertainty, complexity, the unantici-
pated, and of paradox, because relationships are contingent. Approaches to and
debates over the origins, course and ending of the Cold War affirmed some of
these trends in international history. Because the Cold War was the most truly
global conflict, it also stimulated the development of global-world history. This
will be further explored in Chapter 2 (‘War’). One way of joining this debate is
to look at it as largely a question of interlocking ‘problems’ – Russia’s relations
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with the West, Anglo-American/French relations and Germany’s relations with the
rest of Europe.
GLOBAL/WORLD HISTORY
There were attempts at writing global history in the aftermath of World War I,
notably by Arnold Toynbee, who aimed at discovering the patterns of the rise of
Western civilization. Oswald Spengler predicted the ‘Decline of the West’ in 1918.
Barraclough (1979: 153) quoted Huizinga as saying in 1936 that ‘our civilization
is the first to have for its past the past of the world, our history is the first to be
world history’. There was a partial rejection of national history in most of Europe,
and certainly in Germany (Evans, 1997) after World War II as a reaction to ‘nation-
alist’ histories that had fed the warlike desires of the national socialist-fascist states
of Europe and Asia. However, the roots of world history lie in many places,
including historical sociology. Marxist history has always seen the world in global
‘class’ terms. The Annales school, led by French historians Lucien Febvre and
Fernand Braudel, was also influential. Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the
Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1972–1974) can be seen as the
single most significant exemplar of the emerging synthesis that the writing of
‘world history’ was to attempt. He asserted that one must look at how the ‘gentle
rhythms’ and ‘deep-running currents’ contributed to an understanding of change,
that the history of ‘events’ had to be balanced by ‘looking … at economies and
states, societies and civilizations’ and ‘how all these forces came from the depths
and came into play in the complex arena of war’ (Braudel, 1980: 3). The forces that
had ‘come from the depths’ in 1939–1945 had a profound effect on thinking about
history.
It was not, however, until the 1980s and the work of William H. McNeill that
‘world history’ came to be taken more seriously. John Roberts’ ‘world history’,
as Moore puts it, was ‘a history of the world embracing the entire globe from the
history of man to the present day and addressed to an adult readership’ (Moore,
quoted in Bentley, 1997: 941–942). Other attempts, notably by Keylor (2000),
Calvocoressi (1996), Ponting (2000), Bell (2001) and Wills (2001), have been
made with varying degrees of success. Ponting did not merely look at a variety of
regions over long periods of time, but traced common themes and connections
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
between them. His principal themes were the nomad–sedentarist dichotomy, the
transmission of culture, the spread of complex, structured and hierarchical societies,
the origins and problems of modern industrial societies and the impact of Europe on
the rest of the world. One area that was more than ripe for such treatment was that
of the impact of empires, and this has led to a plethora of studies of the impact of
the empires on subject peoples, such as Eliot’s study of the Spanish and British in the
Americas after 1492 (Eliot, 2007).
The Cold War, as a global conflict, provided a framework for, and invited the
writing of, global history. David Reynolds, international-turned-global historian,
accomplished that in his One World Divisible (2000). The Cold War unfolds
through its major crises, from Berlin, via Cuba to Vietnam and beyond, providing
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the key to the analytical narrative. From the US–USSR rivalry, with all its forms
of conflict, Reynolds examines the interactions of the national security states
and their clashes with the non-Western world. ‘Critical’ history provides a very dif-
ferent view of those interactions. It views history as the domain of the conqueror,
especially in the colonial period. It documents the need to rewrite history to tell
the story of the victims and to explain the actions of the victimizers. Tzvetan Todorov
is possibly the greatest living voice of moral outrage on the specific terrors of
the twentieth century. His work has both placed the particular horrors of the
impact of Western European ‘civilization’ in the first half of the twentieth
century into its historical context, and made one appreciate the internal logic of
that civilization’s failings. For Todorov, the conquest of America in 1492 and
the subsequent consequences of imperial conquest set the stage for the eventual
turning in on itself of European civilization in the two world wars. What has truly
distinguished the twentieth century from all others, he argued, is the emergence
of totalitarianism and the largely successful defence against this made by the
liberal democracies (Todorov, 1999). Africa, suffering through colonization and
decolonization, experienced the same ordeal. The battle there between democracy
and totalitarianism is far from over and represents the remnants of European influ-
ence (Todorov, 2000). His work points to crucial unfinished business – a world
history of genocide.
No review, however brief, of global-world history can avoid reference to Felipe
Fernandez-Armesto and his Millennium (1995), Truth: A History (1997) and
Civilizations (2000) in the Americas after 1492 and Christopher Bayly of the impact
of the European empires after 1780 (Bayly, 2004; Eliot, 2007). There is, as Fernandez-
Armesto says, a lot of world out there and global history must help us understand
more of it. Historians must see the world, as meteorologists do, as a system of inter-
connections. Yet the interconnections remain elusive and global theory, to explain
them, inadequate. Organizing devices such as the grand narrative, tracing the
contact between civilizations, comparative histories, incorporating non-Western
historiography and adopting multiple, culturally sensitive perspectives have taken
world histories only to part of the way. Unsure of current theories and methods,
Fernandez-Armesto, in his Civilizations, attempts ‘a radical cultural history of man-
kind’s relationship with nature, which purports to advance a new understanding of
what it means to be ‘civilized’ (2000: XX). It cannot but be both fascinating and
controversial.
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TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY
‘Transnational’ history is not new in the sense that it looks at phenomena that
have always been studied by historians, but new enough in that it merits its
own ‘dictionary’ (Iriye and Saunier, 2009). It certainly tries to use a slightly new
language – one definition has it that ‘transnationalism is best understood not as
fostering bounded networks, but as creating honeycombs, a structure that sustains
and gives shape to the identities of nation-states, international and local institutions,
and particular social and geographic spaces’ (Clavin, 2005: 422), or even ‘[t]ransna-
tionalism is about exploring connections (whether they attract or repel)’ (Clavin,
2005: 427). It even uses expressions like ‘border crossings’ that were used some time
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ago, most notably by British historian Christopher Thorne, who used the expression
in his 1988 book of the same title (Thorne, 1988), even if the credit is not given
by Clavin (2005: 423). So it looks at the way that particular nations and regions
are linked to each other in a myriad ways. Its aim in practice is to try and capture
the dynamic of changes in these relationships over time by looking both at the
domestic developments within any given state and the way they interact with
changes in surrounding states and regions.
There is, of course, a history to this transnational history. Much of it overlaps
and is claimed by our previous category, global-world history. If we include in it
all ‘critics of the national paradigm’, then most of history since the 1970s, at least
since Jacques Le Goff, is ‘transnational’ (Müller and Torp, 2009: 609). It has
been driven, as these authors say, by a ‘contemporary political debates on both
European Integration and détente in East–West relations’, added to which we
could add postcolonialism and globalization (Müller and Torp, 2009: 609–610).
This has led to the usual divisions about how to do it and what it should focus
on, but that is the natural course of all intellectual debates. Others have claimed
that it has made more traditional international history pay a severe price in terms
of turning students away from tried-and-tested paths (in this case, in a criticism
of Ian Tyrell) of understanding American ‘exceptionalism’ and creating ‘a false
antagonism between allegedly exceptionalist American historians and more progres-
sive transnational writers’ (McGerr, 1991: 1056). Others feel it is well worth it, with
David Thelen believing that it has helped to greatly broaden both the historical
understanding of the United States, but also to contextualize much of what the
country does in (as well as to and for) the world (Thelen, 1999). It has also led
to scholars like Heather Jones asking whether any particular phenomenon is inter-
national or transnational? What it does in this latter case, on ‘Humanitarian Action
during the First World War’, is to show the tensions that exist between national and
international (or transnational) efforts in any given field (Jones, 2009: 697).
One of the best examples of this, Ian Tyrell’s analysis of the United States since
1789, Transnational Nation, accepts that ‘[t]he nation was deeply connected in the
nineteenth century to world history and remains so today … There have been ups
and down in this story of transnational connection, as the power of the American
state has changed’ (Tyrell, 2007: 229). Clavin’s collection of essays on transnational
history is particularly concerned to understand the way that international organiza-
tions work (the subject of Chapter 6 of this book) by looking at the networks of
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
elites, and the way they interact within governmental, intergovernmental and non-
governmental organizations in a series of issue areas (Clavin and Wessels, 2005).
Even if she denies the desire to see ‘elites’ as anything more than parts of ‘epistemic
communities’ (Clavin, 2005: 428), a term taken from IR, this time from Peter Haas
(Haas, 1997), that is what they are, as scholars like Inderjeet Parmar have shown in
studies of organizations like Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations
(Parmar, 2004).
This is a very promising development for those who want to see a rapprochement
between IR and international (or any other kind of ) history, as it opens up the
frontiers of both to promising cross-fertilization in some surprising ways. Clavin’s
collection accepts that it is covering ground that was initially explored by IR
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scholars like Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye in what she calls their consideration
of ‘the original understanding of “transnationalism” ’ or indeed Samuel Huntington’s
similar use of the term (Clavin, 2005: 425; Keohane and Nye, 1981; Huntington,
1973). Some of the seminal pieces in this transnational tradition rather resemble
the way that IR scholars tend to use historical texts in a slightly promiscuous way
to illustrate bigger issues. Covering US history from its origins to the present (as
he admits) (Tyrell, 2007: ix) requires as much of a drawing on a vast array of archival
historical work as does an ‘IR’ scholar like John Ikenberry, who is just as respectful
of historiographical accuracy as Tyrell (Ikenberry, 2001) or even ‘real’ historians like
Mark Mazower, whose recent brief book on the United Nations, No Enchanted
Palace (Mazower, 2009b), is scrupulous in its attention to detail but covers a vast
period and subject matter in ways that would leave all diplomatic, and even most
international, historians worried. Among other notable contributions, Michael
Mann, not strictly a ‘historian’, has shown how a sociological imagination can inter-
act with historical scholarship in wonderful ways (Mann, 1986, 1993).
CONCLUSION: POSTMODERNISM?
Diplomatic, international and global-world history have all suffered, and benefited,
from scrutiny from within (i.e. from the history profession) and from outside
(i.e. from social scientists). They could not hope to escape, moreover, assaults from
postmodernists. As Michael Bentley says, early twentieth-century historiography
was for a long time a kind of ‘theology, the study of error’, intent on sniffing
out ‘mistakes’. This has had some unlikely casualties, such as the great historians
of the past like Gibbon or Carlyle, who were often fast and loose with the ‘truth’.
Until about 1960 this tradition persisted and then the citadel came under attack
from those who believed that should be theorized, which as he says ‘brought upon
professional history an embarrassing sense of self-consciousness’. This in turn led
to a denial that any kind of ‘truth’ could be established, and this is the trend that
still makes the most ink flow (Bentley, 1997: xiii–xv). The main new, often very
contested, influences on the whole of the social sciences and humanities over
the past thirty years have of course been those of ‘poststructuralism’ and ‘postmod-
ernism’. The former was especially influential in transforming literary studies
although the impact has been much wider. Even John Lewis Gaddis refers to a need
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
to ‘deconstruct’ the title of his famous book, We Now Know (Gaddis, 1997: viii).
But of course poststructuralism’s influence has remained partial in history and IR,
both because of the forces of tradition and because in some cases the insights are
not conclusively damaging to the existing ways of doing things. It might be remem-
bered that it was a liberal revulsion to colonialism as much as a Marxist or poststruc-
turalist attack on it that finally led to the decolonization of the planet and also
the fact that many of the great thinkers who are associated with this revulsion did
so within a liberal educational system.
Robert Young has given us a useful synthesis of this in his White Mythologies,
in which he reminds us that most of the poststructuralist thinkers derived their
ideas from concrete experiences, so ‘Sartre, Althusser, Derrida and Lyotard, among
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others, were all either born in Algeria or personally involved with the events of
the war’ (1990: 3; to this list we could, of course, add Camus). In this parade
of French philosophers, Young points to the resurgence of the Frankfurt School
and seems to agree with Vincent Descombes, who posits that the whole of French
philosophy over the last hundred years has been a dialectic between the Hegelian
German school, of which the Frankfurt School is the latest development, and the
French emphasis on the experience of the individual. Poststructuralism thus
challenges, for Young, the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ (Young, 1990: chapter 1, esp. 1–6).
This led to a rethinking of the colonial past and much else besides, and laid
the ground for the postmodernist critique of all ‘truth’ and its supposed philosophi-
cal underpinning, the Enlightenment, which is now supposedly totally discredited
by its products, colonialism and the Holocaust, among other disasters. So a study
of history that was of nations in the nineteenth century and until after World
War II became transformed into a much wider refection on the nature of humanity.
Purely ‘national’ history had to change as a result of the horrors imputed to national-
ism in the first fifty years of the century.
Selecting the key texts of postmodernist historiography in a sense goes against
its entire ethos. But Hayden White is usually seen as the father of the new wave,
with his Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe
(1975). Of this, Richard Evans comments that it was ‘much-discussed but little-
imitated’, and was in any case more ‘structuralist than post-structuralist in inspira-
tion’ (Evans, 1997: 290). Another major writer in this vein is Keith Jenkins, whose
Rethinking History (Jenkins, 1991) and On ‘What is History’ (Jenkins, 1995) are
useful summaries of the denial of the Establishment of Elton and Carr. Also interest-
ing is Alex Callinicos, Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History
(Callinicos, 1995). The grand old man of historiographical postmodernism is the
same as that of IR, Jean Baudrillard, whose The Illusion of the End (Baudrillard,
1994) crops up repeatedly in both disciplines.
Postmodernists would usually argue that ‘a historical text … can no longer
be regarded as having wholly fixed and unalterable meaning given by its author’.
But, as Richard Evans counters, ‘it is doubtful whether anyone, in fact, has ever
believed that meaning can be fixed in this way’. Carlyle and Gibbon were well
aware that they were interpreting history in their ‘text’; history, after all, means
‘story’. As Evans put it, even ‘diplomatic history was largely built on the analysis
of the ambiguities of diplomatic documents – not all of them intentional – and has
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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
taken much of its analytical power from its awareness of the possibility, even likeli-
hood, that a treaty, or a protocol, could, and often would, be interpreted by different
states in different ways’. But neither, says Evans, can we assume that we can ‘impose
any meaning we wish on such a text either … Postmodern theorists are simply
being unrealistic here.’ The dialogue in any historical research is that between ‘two
different kinds of significances – the historian’s and the document’s’ (Evans, 1997:
103–107). It is also true to say that postmodern historians themselves would
probably accuse Evans of burning straw men in such comments (Jenkins, 1997 is
a very useful summary and reader). The postmodern discourse is not one we can
avoid thinking about, and we will on occasion use its language and evidence in this
book. What is omitted (‘closures’ in postmodern parlance) are just as important
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as what is known, and it would be foolish in the extreme to deny that French
poststructuralism, whence much postmodernism springs, is not as relevant a
phenomenon as any other intellectual taproot.
But there’s a growing awareness that all of us who deal with the ‘international’,
however defined, have to move from the very narrow definition of the history
of states while not throwing out that baby with bathwater that surrounds states,
their regional, transnational and global relationships. But equally without some
historians still studying what some French political scientists call the historians’
fond de tiroir (by which they normally mean old-fashioned diplomatic history of
two states over a short period, written in immense detail and based on diplomatic
correspondence), there can be no ‘bigger’ picture history, or indeed political science.
We need both the micro and the macro in order to make some sense of the world.
The lesson may be that the more we enlarge the list of factors that matter in the
study of history and IR the more we need to cross-fertilize the academic genres,
and the more we need to accept that any picture will be approximate and to
some extent subjective. In that we can accept the criticism of the postmodern critics,
but also accept what Richard Evans has sagely said, it has always been understood to
be thus; to say otherwise is to indulge in straw man criticism.
32
CHAPTER 2
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War
The idea that every war has been different from the last is the delusion of those who
know no history.
(Liddell Hart, Thoughts on War, 1932/1944: 24)
You will hear of wars and rumours of wars, but see to it you are not alarmed. Such
things must happen but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and
kingdom against kingdom.
(Matthew, 22: 15)
INTRODUCTION
The discussion of what causes and motivates war and what can end it (as with peace,
see Chapter 3) is a, maybe the, central obsession of students of IR and IH alike. It is
also riddled with paradox. We are constantly told by some that it has changed its
nature; especially since the Industrial Revolution, change accelerated by technology,
even to the point of it being ‘postmodern’ (Nef, 1968; Gray, 1998), an evolution of
global political systems and theories (Mitrany, 1943/1966) or even by a change in
human nature. Religion is seen by some as making for very different views about
why war should be fought ad bellum as well as how it should be conducted in bello
(Popovski, Reichberg and Turner, 2009; Towle, 2009). There is much debate about
whether wars can ever ‘end’ and huge discussions about the respective weight to be
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WAR
given to different factors in the causes and outcomes of war (Blainey, 1988, is a good
place to start). There are others (like Liddell Hart, 1932/1944, above) who aver that
it has not changed much, if at all (Gray, 2005). This chapter will explore these
themes by looking at a number of wars and the way they have been interpreted. As
with the other chapters in this volume, we will of necessity be very selective, even
subjective, in which wars are examined, but all of them will be used to ask a number
of basic questions of interest to the IR scholar and international historian alike. The
key ones include:
• What weight can we give to the importance of the ‘great man’ (or rarely
‘woman’) as opposed to the structures in which these individuals operated in the
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WAR
(Clausewitz, 1976), on strategy and warfare in general and war in European history
in particular. On war outside Europe, the great classic is The Art of War by Sun Tzu,
which dates from around 500 bce (Sun Tzu, 1998).
The other questions constitute what Stephen Van Evera has called ‘a philosophers’
industry for centuries’ where ‘[s]adly, though, scholars have made scant progress on
the problem’. For Van Evera this is because:
[m]ost of the causes that the [literature on war] identifies cannot be manipulated
(for example human instinct, the nature of the domestic economic and political
systems of states, or the distribution of power among states).’ The ‘stock of
hypotheses’ on solutions to war [he cites disarmament, pacifism and reliance on
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WAR
However, the glory and excitement of war are equally strong tropes in the Western,
and indeed global, imagination. How else to explain the way the soldiers of 1914
marched off to battle (and, in many cases, death) singing and having flowers thrown
at them? Many writers (Louis-Ferdinand Céline is a good example) have derided
this, but it was deeply and widely felt at the time, even by Céline himself, who was
decorated for bravery, though his celebrated book Voyage au bout de la nuit is a
eulogy to cowardice (Céline, 1932/1999). War is closely associated with ideas of
common purpose (nation building, commerce, technology); it has been the very
stuff of the evolution of Western Europe and beyond (Howard, 1976; Nef, 1968;
Preston, Wise and Werner, 1956).
There are, however, seemingly a few areas upon which all thinkers and practitio-
ners of war of the last two hundred years can reasonably agree. The first is that the
language of war and the language of peace are intimately linked. From the peace
activist to the warmonger, it is accepted that war is a learned social activity. There is
a perhaps astonishing agreement on this idea in IR, too, from critical theorists and
feminists on one hand to strategists (generally of the Right) on the other (Jabri,
1994; Gray, 1999). This, of course, implies that we have to understand the social
context in which war takes place. We might reasonably ask, therefore, if the context
in which Western wars have taken place is the same as that in the Third World? The
tacit assumption underlying most United Nations (q.v.) and other official instances
is that we can use the historical examples of the West to determine what causes wars
in developing countries and that the necessary cures for war are those that worked
in the West – democracy, capitalism, etc. (see Williams, 2006, for one treatment of
this problem, and Towle, 2009, for a critique of what that has meant for British
foreign policy).
So the second major area of agreement is that history can be a good guide, but it
is one that has to be handled with extreme care. History can and must provide a
series of necessary contexts for thinking about war and war can provide the context
for thinking about history. As W. B. Gallie says in the introduction to his Philosophers
of Peace and War, ‘we can perhaps best come to appreciate the distinctive structure
of the international problem, centered on the causes of war and the possibilities of
peace’ by looking at them both in their historical context but also as ‘participants in
a time-transcending dialogue’ (Gallie, 1978).
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WAR
The mechanics of warfare itself have changed over the centuries. War has also
arguably been the major vector in societal change, and has led to the creation of
the ‘West’ in a variety of ways – politically (in terms of thinking and institutional
structures), socially and economically. These paths of human endeavour have always
been linked, and changes within them all have tended to accelerate in the crisis
situations of war. War drives individuals and communities to examine their funda-
mental attitudes, beliefs and actions in ways that no other impetus can. Peace can
seem ‘boring’ because its processes can be slow and ponderous, but there is nothing
slow and ponderous about war.
However, we cannot give a good account of all the wars that have been fought,
even those of the last century. A selection has had to be made, and that choice
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has come down on what we believe to have been the system-changing wars of recent
times, but also those that have given us our major mythology of war itself. As
we hope to make clear, we believe that wars in ancient times have to be studied as
much as we would all accept the need to study the world wars and the Cold War
of the twentieth century. IR is currently obsessed with these major events; one
day it may not be and maybe it should not be. But for a beginner in the discipline it
is a good place to start. Our ‘new’ (Kaldor, 1999) and our ‘postmodern’ (Kalyvas,
2006) wars have a great deal in common with ‘ancient’ warfare and are in many
sense ‘premodern’, so reference will be made within the broader framework to what
small and seemingly insignificant wars have to say about IR more generally.
The shadow of the wars of ancient Greece and Rome have always obsessed Western
thinkers, about politics in general and war in particular. Herodotus is the inevitable
starting point with his description of the wars between Greeks and between Greeks
and Persians, which he described a century after the events in the fifth century bce
(Herodotus, 1996). The continuing relevance of Greek military tactics is explained
wonderfully by Victor Hanson in The Western Way of War (Hanson, 2009). Although
until the 1970s most schoolchildren in Britain were forced to read Livy on Hannibal’s
wars (Livy, 2006) and Caesar’s Gallic Wars – the latter containing interminable
accounts of the great man as he slew his way through the Celts and Gauls (Caesar
and Hammond, 2008, 58–50 bce) – they are still all a good read.
Most serious commentators on war will usually start with the paradoxes posed
by the ancient Greeks and Romans, the most celebrated being ‘vis pacem, para
bellum’ – in the words of Vegetius (De Re Militari, 2001), ‘if you would seek
peace, prepare for war’ (Luttwak, 2001: 3, and chapter 1, ‘The Conscious Use of
Paradox in War’). This is the classic definition of what we would now call raison
d’état. There also exist excellent commentaries on the Roman way of war that
have uncanny echoes of the way that warrior virtues are even today evoked and
described – the need for discipline, courage and, maybe above all, organization
(Campbell, 1994).
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WAR
Vegetius’ dictum about preparedness for war during peace also held within it the
idea that the citizenry of his day were, in the words of Richard Tuck, ‘treated … as
defeated combatants’ by the state structures that had finally emerged from a long
period of civil war, the death of the Republic and a chaotic series of emperors in
the first century bce, described by Lucan in the first century ce (Lucan, 1999).
His illustrious predecessors, Julius Caesar (assassinated 44 bce) or Cicero (106–43
bce) would have thought very differently about war, as their experiences had
largely been in the Republican period. When Cicero wrote in praise of republican
liberty and of the self-sacrifice of the republican heroes, he was assuming that
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men would subordinate their interests to that of their republic (Tuck, 1999: 11–12).
We must thus remember that the history of the Roman Republic itself had much
to do with why Vegetius wrote these words. This basic observation shows how
notions of ‘individual autonomy’, Tuck’s main concern, can be changed by the social
context in which wars take place. From this basic dichotomy we might derive a
narrative of individual rights, the behaviour of states and many of the broader con-
cerns of the study of politics.
As another Roman historian, Sallust, pointed out, war is also an activity that
links the domestic and the international spheres of a people’s experience. In his
writings on the subjugation of the Numidians and their King Jugurtha (111–105
bce), Sallust emphasized the importance of a solid home front in the (then) ‘war
on terror’ as Rome saw it – then, as now, ‘some grieved for the glory of the empire,
others – unaccustomed to the circumstances of war – feared for freedom’ (Sallust,
2007: 82).
War is thus both the supreme individual experience, in that a man or woman
can believe they will fight it as part of their duty, and are often then faced with a
lonely death, and a collective one on the battlefield in that military units as small
as platoons (in modern warfare) or phalanxes (in ancient Greek parlance) required
total solidarity. John Keegan’s The Face of Battle (Keegan, 1976) demonstrates the
understanding that ultimately the warrior fights for his ‘mates’ in the trench or
line of battle next to him, not for some higher purpose. The study of the history
of war is therefore also vital to giving us an understanding of how societies fight
wars. Clausewitz’s dictum that ‘war is politics by other means’ (Clausewitz, 1976;
Heuser, 2002: chapter 3) illustrates that war at most epochs, if not all, is a ‘normal’
activity, not an exception. It therefore requires some sort of basic societal code to be
kept in place in any society, in case that society be called upon to fight.
Lebow usefully sums up the driving forces behind ancient societies, and by exten-
sion all societies, as ‘fear, interest, honor and habit’ – a short list but a serviceable
one (Lebow, 2008: 4). So another key paradox that emerges from the practice and
study of war in ‘ancient’ times that is still with us are the motivations of the warriors
themselves, their conception of ‘honour’. This is also a particular current concern in
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WAR
IR (Sherman, 2006; Coker, 2007; Donelan, 2007; Lebow, 2008). Warrior ‘codes’ or
‘honour’ are embedded in any military and social establishment or, as Shannon
French says, ‘[w]arrior cultures throughout history and from diverse regions around
the globe have constructed codes of behaviour based on their own image of the ideal
warrior’ (French, 2003: 3). Equally, the importance of the warrior ethic is often
evoked as a touchstone, not just for valour and honour (virtus in Latin) but for the
vigour that states and communities are said to manifest through the ability to wage
war. Lebow comments that ‘[p]ursuit of Virtus may explain why Rome was con-
stantly at war’ (Lebow, 2008: 206). The very existence of the Roman Empire was
inextricable from its understanding of what war was for. As we will see in our discus-
sion of the Roman Empire (Chapter 5), the most energetic and idealized Roman
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period was that of the Republic and of the Antonine emperors that succeeded them
(Gibbon, 1830). Edward Gibbon is the main proponent of this in his Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon, 1776/[1981]). His successors, including Theodor
Mommsen in his magisterial History of Rome (Momssen, 1996), made very similar
play on the links between Roman Virtus and war (see also Chapter 5).
Hence a first observation we can make about the Roman attitude to war that has
clear implications for our understanding of it is that the political and social context
has a determining effect on how we read any given writer. It must also be said
that those who write about Rome, and her wars in particular, often use it as an
opportunity to talk about their own time. Mommsen in particular was keen to stress
the democratic nature of the Republican period and wary of the impending
(in 1854–1856) imperial tone that his native Germany was taking. He might have
been warning about what liberal and socialist British and German opinion was
later to call ‘militarism’, shorthand for an excessive reliance on military force
abroad to deflect domestic unrest (Leibknecht, 1917/1973; Williams, 1998: 180–
181). Gibbon was keen to draw parallels with the discipline of the Roman armies
with the indiscipline of the British in ce 43, when the emperor Claudius started the
campaign that finally conquered Britannicum:
They took up arms with savage fierceness; they laid them down or turned them
against each other with wild inconstancy; and while they fought singly, they were
successively subdued.
(Gibbon, 1776: 30)
The inhabitants of the new island conquest understood why they were being
defeated: In a later campaign, in 83 ce the chieftain Calgacus told his army before
the battle of Mons Graupius in Caledonia, now Scotland, that ‘It is our quarrels
and disunion that have given them fame. The reputation of the Roman Army is
built up on the faults of its enemies’ (Tacitus, Agricola, 98 ce). Another of Calgacus’
most famous summaries of Roman success from the same account is: ‘They make a
solitude [or desert] and call it peace’ (Tacitus, 1971).
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WAR
Even if the nature of war has changed drastically in the last hundred years, then
the main political, social and economic vectors of that change can be said to have
been already present in the few centuries before that. They were then accelerated
by the rise of states, and the mobilization through economic forces and the
emergence of the political ‘mass’. The system that characterized medieval Europe,
and the idea of a unified ‘Christendom’, one unified by political hierarchy and
religious allegiance, was severely shaken by a series of secular movements that
had their direct effect on the conduct of war. These were the Reformation of the
sixteenth century and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth, which changed for ever
the nature of man’s relationship to God and to the pursuit of knowledge, both
of which were increasingly individualized. To this must be added the revolutions,
especially the ‘Great’ revolutions that changed both state and society in France
(1789), Russia (1917) and China (1949), but also those in England (1641) and
what became the United States (1776), and that led to popular sovereignty being
seen as a norm of political organization (Armstrong, 1993; Calvert, 1997; Chan and
Williams, 1994; Skocpol, 1979).
The modern nation-state, first in a few areas of the European landmass and
then across most of the planet, saw its origins in the emergence of
the French, Dutch and Spanish states from the fifteenth century on (Tilly, 1975)
and in the ‘Tudor revolution’ in England in the sixteenth (Elton, 1953 – see also
the debate on the ‘Whig’ theory of history: Coleman and Starkey, 1986). Many
historians have noted the links between this phenomenon and war in both
general and specific terms, and Michael Howard’s classic text War in European
History sets the tone for this literature: ‘The origins of Europe were hammered
out on the anvil of war’ (Howard, 1976: 1). Charles Tilly probably did most to
set the tone for war being an essential part of state-building with his often-quoted
‘war made states and vice versa’ (Tilly, 1990: 67). Contemporary historians
agree and put the emphasis even more precisely. Hence Elizabeth Kier writes
that ‘[w]arfare and the army are tied inextricably to the state-building process’
(Kier, 1999: 3) and naval historians claim the same for their form of warfare.
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WAR
The most recent comprehensive volume on British sea power makes it plain that ‘the
significance of sea power to British history lies at least as much in domestic politics
and the growth of the state as in foreign policy and war (Rodger, 2006: 577).
The rise of the modern state is key to understanding why warfare changed
so much in the period after 1815. As we shall see below, though, there was a
much wider acceptance of ‘just war’ rules. A seeming ‘civilization’ of war and human
relationships was seen as taking place, especially during the long and mainly peace-
ful nineteenth century in Europe, along with the rise of successful and powerful
nationalistic and industrialized nation-states. Some, like Carl von Clausewitz,
realized, albeit late in his life, that this was creating a false sense of security, but
his warnings were drowned out in a tide of patriotic fervour. The Napoleonic
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Wars (1791–1815) had seemingly proved the power of the offensive, which was
tied in the mind of, particularly, Prussian/German military thinking to the power
of a nation, indeed a people, mobilized in a common cause, la levée en masse.
The great statements of this came from Clausewitz, much quoted and much
misunderstood (see below), as well as the future Marshal Foch and the Antoine
Jomini in the 1860s (Gat, 1992). The emergence of a Romantic and anti-
Enlightenment spirit in Germany has been blamed by many for the ‘militarism’ that
drove imperial Germany to unify itself (mostly) by war and to defeat France in 1871
(Gat, 1992).
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Just war
As Chris Brown puts it, just war theory ‘must be one of the only areas of contempo-
rary moral philosophy where an essentially mediaeval theoretical construction
still has common currency’ (Brown, 1992: 132). Just war theory in medieval times
was developed as a way of discriminating between those it was lawful (even desir-
able) to attack and destroy, ‘the infidel’, and those it was not. It also provided a
way of reducing the impact of internecine conflict within Christendom, which was
unified under the Church and the Holy Roman Emperor and subject to a web
of intricate feudal rules and relationships. But with the Reformation, and the
division of Christendom into warring sovereign states that allied themselves on
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the basis of ‘national interest’ and religion against each other, the feudal pattern
dissolved in the Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years’ War. It was only with the
end of that war in 1648, and the signature of the Treaties of Westphalia (one of
which was actually signed at Munster), that sovereign states were established in a
way that we would now find more recognizable (Osiander, 1994).
By 1835, Alfred de Vigny was able to state in The Military Necessity, that:
Formerly, the vanquished were massacred or enslaved for life, captured towns
were sacked, their populations hunted or dispersed; while every state stood by,
appalled, in constant, desperate readiness, prepared to be as cruel in defence as
in attack. To-day cities have no more to fear than the levying of indemnities.
War has become civilised.
(de Vigny, 1953: 5–6)
One of the main explanations for this was the development, refinement and,
most important of all, the general application of the law of war. The two central
notions of the law of war (jus ad bellum and jus in bello) are so well-known that
it would be superfluous to dwell on them at too great length. Just war originated in
the many changes made in premodern societal practice, including warfare, and is
generally claimed to have been the product of Christian thinkers, although recent
scholarship is trying to redress the balance by pointing to similar traditions in
Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu and even Sikh thought and practice (Robinson, 2003).
It was based in all these traditions on the need to circumscribe the impact of war
while generally not deeming it to be unacceptable practice. It has certainly never
been far from the thinking of scholars of IR since the end of the Cold War, and even
earlier (two key contributions being Walzer, 1992, and Bellamy, 2006).
The great chronicler of the rise of the modern state and its way of making war is
naturally Carl von Clausewitz. No decent account of the development of war or of
the rise of military doctrine (and thus strategic studies more broadly) can ignore
the insights of On War (1830/1976). Many current gurus of strategic studies still
take his views on war as essential (Gray, 1999; Moran in Baylis et al., 2002).
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As Beatrice Heuser has pointed out, Clausewitz never properly finished his master-
work, and a guide to the Guide is essential (Heuser, 2002). Heuser breaks his insights
down into: the civil–military relationship, one of the key ideas in modern thinking
about state-building (and disintegration); the role of generalship and serendipity
(Friktion, see below); and the defensive–offensive debate, which became so impor-
tant during and after the World War I and is still with us, i.e. how can ‘Total War’
help being as damaging to the attacker as the defender? She even gives us an insight
into how Clausewitz has influenced several generations of guerrilla leaders. He is an
intensely contemporary theorist of war and peace.
The most profound paradoxes of all are to be found in war. Clausewitz said
that war ‘belongs to the province of social life … War is not an activity of the will
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exerted upon inanimate matter like the mechanical arts … but against a living
re-acting force’ (Clausewitz, in Gallie, 1978: 43). He also claimed elsewhere that
‘[t]he introduction of the principle of moderation in the philosophy of war is an
absurdity’ (quoted by Amiral Lanxade in Sancery, 1999). So when war happens,
it had the potential in Clausewitz’s day, fully realized in the last hundred years,
to include whole societies in its embrace, to destroy them utterly unless peace could
be achieved by victory or the acceptance of defeat.
War is also full of pitfalls, most of them by their nature unpredictable, and
so is the making of peace. The process that von Clausewitz identified as ‘friktion’
in war, the chance for serendipity to upset the best laid plans, is as true in
peace-making as in war-making (Cimbala, 2001). Clausewitz himself described it as
‘The effect of reality on ideas and intentions in war’ (Watts, 2006: 1, quoting
Clausewitz, to his future wife, Marie Brühl, on 29 September 1806) and elsewhere
as ‘the force that makes the apparently easy so difficult’ (Clausewitz, 1976: 68,
book 1, chapter 7).
The idea of being able to predict with any real certainty what will happen if
a certain strategic decision is taken in war is as hazardous as knowing what will
happen if a certain path towards a lasting peace is taken after that war is (provision-
ally, at least) ‘ended’. As Colin Gray puts it, ‘defining and achieving decisive victory’
is never a precise art. ‘If “victory” unadorned is hard to corral intellectually,
what sense can we make of “decisive” victory?’ He points out that many states in
powerful, even seemingly unassailable, positions have believed they could achieve
that, and been destroyed along with their own hubris. They often saw themselves as
the great ‘peacemakers’ with their own version of what ‘peace’ should mean (Rome,
Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, possibly now the United States). But they could
not predict what the effects of their warmaking to bring about a lasting peace could
be. Without a realistic political goal, war can simply not be successful.
Naval warfare
Naval warfare, long considered the ‘senior’ service, is now largely relegated to a
back-up role to the army and air force in all major nations. However, it gave birth
in the modern era to understandings of war that go beyond the mere command
of the seas that are of continued relevance today (Tangredi, in Baylis et al., 2002).
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Not only can naval historians give us an understanding of purely naval tactics
(Rodger, 2006; Davies, 2002), but they also have given much fruit for thought
about what makes a ‘great’ military commander – Nelson being the obvious example
(Lambert, 2004; Coleman, 2001). Two other key developments in the study of
IR more broadly should also be considered – in particular, ‘geopolitics’. Halford
Mackinder’s idea of the need for the dominance of the ‘World Island’ gave much
food for thought to geopolitically obsessed political leaders (Parker, 1982). The
absolute need for sea power divided these late nineteenth-century geopoliticians,
with Mackinder coming to the belief that it was not absolutely essential for global
empire, while Mahan and Friedrich Ratzel believed it was (Ashworth and Ashworth,
2010). American President Theodore Roosevelt and his successors, as well as
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American geopolitical theorist Admiral Mahan (Gat, 1992: chapter 4), saw Britain’s
claim to be the protector of the world’s shipping as an attack on the ‘Freedom of the
Seas’ about which Woodrow Wilson made much play (it figured in the Fourteen
Points of 1918; see also British naval theorist Julian Corbett, 1914/2009) and
the subsequent naval disarmament conferences in Washington in 1922 and 1932
(Williams, 1998). It also convinced Adolf Hitler, and his favourite geopolitician
Karl Haushofer, whose notions of Lebensraum had a distinctly geopolitical slant
to them (Herzstein, 1982).
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machines (Wells, 1898; Pick, 1993; many films like the Terminator series; Virilio,
1989). All of these delimitations have their problems – war has always pitted more
technologically advanced armies against those less so enabled; the supposedly more
‘civilized’ period before the last century often saw huge casualties and suffering
among civilian populations, especially in civil wars and revolutions. But the rise
of democracy as a dominant form of ideal political organization has made such
horrors less acceptable in liberal societies and beyond (Norman, 1995; Williams,
2006).
Wherein lie the roots of these paradoxes of our collective understanding of
the evolution of modern warfare? Partly it lies in our received understandings
of what war is for. Liddell Hart saw in the 1940s that the problem of the late
nineteenth-century military mind had been that it was still obsessed with the
great thinkers of ancient times who had had their belief in the necessity of military
glory reinforced by the romantic nationalist feelings of the period before 1914.
He comments that ‘[this] was beneficial in so far as it led soldiers to imbibe the
bottled wisdom of the Greek and Roman masters. But it too often produced an
intoxication … a revival of the phalanx, [and] ignored … the modern fact of the
bullet’ (Liddell Hart, 1944: 110). When this hubris was observed in the enemies of
the great imperial European powers, it could be an advantage to the conquerors.
The justification for the waging of war against colonial peoples in the modern
period more broadly draws from the wellspring of classical justification by writers
about Rome’s treatment of ‘barbarians’, while also respecting Liddell Hart’s ‘bullet’
addendum. For, as Hilaire Belloc wrote in The Modern Traveller, ‘Whatever
happens, we have got, the Maxim gun, and they have not’ (1898). The lesson for
the newly colonized peoples of the nineteenth century was that if you wished to be
‘free’ it was good idea to submit to the fealty of a great republic, a logic that sees
its sequel in liberal imperialism in most Western states in the nineteenth and,
indeed, in the twentieth century. This dialectic has pervaded modern thinking
about war and statehood – and is one that we also see in non-Western thought
systems like Islam. We are constantly torn between the idea of a single Imperium
(or Umma in Islam) or that of more atomized, ‘self-determined’ nation-states
(Williams, 1998).
But in the early twentieth century, the disequilibrium of the West versus the rest
was soon to be turned on its head by the very same technology that gave the West
an advantage in its colonial adventures. Individual courage arguably started being
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downplayed in favour of later developments in ‘post modern war’ (Gray, 1998) once
the offensive gave away the advantage to the defensive, probably first really apparent
in the American Civil War of 1861–1865 (McPherson, 2001; Keegan, 2009). In the
trenches of World War I, machine guns made the taking of even a few yards of
enemy territory a fruitless and bloody enterprise (Liddell Hart, 1944; Belloc,
1898).
its own section. It has generated huge numbers of books and articles, quite often
more than a hundred a year. Good recent summaries of this literature, including
discussions of the diplomatic, social and cultural historiographical trends, include
Jay Winter and Antoine Prost’s The Great War in History (2005). There are many
excellent overview histories of this war, but the best short introduction is probably
by Gerard De Groot (De Groot, 2000) and a longer account by David Stevenson
(Stevenson, 2005), though we could cite many more.
The reasons for this widespread obsession are many, among the most important
was that it was the first truly global war. It had a particular nature, not reproduced
in its entirety ever again (but nearly so in the Korean War, 1950–1953, and the
Ethiopian/ Eritrean wars of the 1980s and 1990s). It was the first in which machines
became arguably more important than manpower (Pick, 1993). And it was the first
that pitted a variety of (mostly) democratically elected governments against each
other and hence was the first war to really change the way public opinion played
a role in the war and the peace that succeeded it (Knock, 1992). This has had
profound effects for how we see the mythology, and how the (then) contemporary
as well as succeeding generations have grounded it in a collective memory, with a
corresponding change in the iconography of war and in its commemoration (Fussell,
1975; Winter, 1995).
Last, but by no means least, World War I was the first where, in the ‘civilized’
nations of the West – the main protagonists of the war – there was a shift in
an understanding as to how the world could be profoundly changed by war. This
reflection ranged from those who saw the war as a system-changing event (Polanyi,
1945; Carr, 1939 are the better-known examples), a move that in effect gave rise
to the discipline of IR itself. Certainly the main ‘thinkers of the Twenty Years’
Crisis’, as they have been dubbed (Long and Wilson, 1995) were often policymakers
in 1914–1918, who often became academics after it, many of them great liberal
figures who aimed to prop up liberal democracy or economics (notably, John
Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek). Others, like Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, not
to mention Hitler and Mussolini, drew the opposite conclusions and tried with all
their vigour and military might to overthrow the alliance that had won the war and
the ‘Carthaginian’ peace. IR was forged in that cauldron of war and has borne
its mark ever since. But equally it gave birth to interests that are only now really
surfacing in the study of IR. Feminism, for example, has had a huge boost from
writers like Cynthia Enloe (1993/2000), but who has now heard of the prominent
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(feminist and pacifist) Labour Party woman delegate to the League of Nations from
1929, Helena Swanwick. Her statement of 1915 that:
The adventures of women in war are solitary and full of horror … When aviators
drop bombs, when guns bombard fortified towns, it is not possible to avoid the
women and children who may chance to be in the way. Women have to make
good the economic disasters of war; they go short, they work double tides, they
pay war taxes and war prices, like men, and out of smaller incomes.
(Swanwick, 1915: 8 and 1, quoted in Ashworth, 2011: 30)
The collective memory and representation of this war has had a more lasting effect
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than most. Historians, military commentators and cultural analysts have gone
through a series of linked phases of observation. The phase of what might be called
‘acceptance’ was brief, in that there was no huge questioning of the way the war
was fought until the late 1920s, in the words of the British Victory Medal (given
to all surviving servicemen, including my grandfather, John Williams), which was
described as the ‘Great War for Civilization’, although there was a natural regret
about the huge loss of life. Ernst Jünger, a much-decorated and wounded German
storm trooper, who later flirted with Nazism but was never a true convert, wrote
an autobiographical account of his war experiences, Storm of Steel (2004), as a paean
to the nobility of conflict but also as a realistic account of trench warfare that is
still probably the best of its kind. Jünger’s most moving chapter, about the fighting
around Guillemont in September 1916, was the same battle where the prime
minister’s son, Raymond Asquith, was killed and where my grandfather’s brother
Charles (aged 20) was killed. Jünger later became a key figure in the reconciliation
of Europe after 1945 and wrote a little-remarked-upon but important rejoinder to
his own book, published in 1948 in the United States (but not in Britain), The Peace
(1948).
In the late 1920s and 1930s a series of literary interpretations, notably Erich
Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Siegfried Sassoon’s
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That
(1929), contributed to a growing revulsion with war, in Britain particularly. The
positive view of the generalship, especially by Field Marshal Haig, was definitively
punctured by the subsequent publication of a series of major works of poetry,
notably the posthumous poems of Wilfred Owen (killed a few days before the
Armistice in 1918) and several others of note. This was reinforced by later interpre-
tations, notably Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (Fussell, 1975).
Fussell has summed up the case file against Haig and the politicians who let him
do what he did: ‘The disaster [in this case, the Battle of the Somme, 1916] had
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many causes. Lack of imagination was one … Another cause was traceable to the
class system and the assumptions it sanctioned … A final cause … was a total lack
of surprise. There was a hopeless absence of cleverness about the whole thing,
entirely characteristic of its author’ (Fussell, 1975: 13).
The military criticism was arguably first concretized by Basil Liddell Hart,
himself an officer in the trenches (Liddell Hart, 1932/1944), and followed up
by other military figures like Major General J. F. C. Fuller (Fuller, 1948), who is
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quoted by Colin Gray as saying in January 1919 that ‘strategy, command, leader-
ship, discipline, supply, organization and all the moral and physical paraphernalia
of war are nothing to a high superiority of weapons … no army of 50 years ago
before any date selected would stand a dog’s chance against the army existing at
that date.’ Fuller’s bleak assessment of the impossibility of men fighting in a techno-
logical war is agreed with by Gray on the level of his emphasis on the importance
of technology, but as ‘monumentally wrong’ in that technology can never determine
wars, people do – ‘strategic history tells us that people matter more than machines’
(Gray, 2005: 99–100).
This debate is far from over. In between the wars there was a major change
of heart in all the major combatant states about the way war should be fought, given
the obvious advantage of the defensive on the Western Front. The names of Heinz
Guderian in Germany and Colonel (later General) Charles de Gaulle in France
revolutionized warfare and gave the advantage of war back to the offensive (Kier,
1999).
The reverberations of 1914–1918 go wider than this one war, though. Fussell
quotes Corelli Barnett as saying that ‘the pattern established during the Great War
is still with us: great international questions are seen in simple moralistic and
idealistic terms, as emotional crusades’ (Fussell, 1975: 109). Philip Towle examines
a variety of British justifications for standing up to ‘tyranny’ over more than
two centuries. He reminds us that Britain has been involved in many more wars
than most countries; that the evangelical side of British foreign policy has been
more than evident since the time of Wilberforce at least in a ‘synergy between
national interest and faith’ (Towle, 2009: 2). But history can also be used to justify
the opposite. Historians and policymakers of the Balkans still evoke what
Ambassador Richard Holbrooke called the ‘Rebecca West effect’ (Holbrooke, 1998)
to warn against extrapolating the problems of one Balkan (or any other) war into
another one. More recent novelists like Pat Barker, and Sebastian Faulks in Birdsong
(Faulks, 1993), have added to this primary generation with similar presentations of
war, but, as Niall Ferguson points out, more sex (Ferguson, 1998: xxxxi–xxxxii).
The role of memory in any war has, of course, always been important, but
World War I took that truth to a higher level, both immediately after it was ended
and since. In the immediate aftermath, the war elicited demands for revenge and
reparation from Germany and its allies from the victorious Western Allies (Macmillan,
2001, and Williams, 2006, both have useful summaries of a vast literature).
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That was followed by a continental-wide, even global, wave of grief and mourning
and the erection of countless memorials to the war, as well as the reorganization
and tending in perpetuity of war graves, both new phenomena of the last century
(Winter, 1995) and continued for every major war since.
Partly as a reaction to the generally accepted interpretation of the unremitting
horror of the trenches and the general futility of the conflict this has not gone unchal-
lenged. Ferguson’s The Pity of War (1998) was a not-uncontroversial milestone
that made a number of (then) startling claims, notably about the widely accepted
version of the ‘evil [of ] war’, ‘the myths of militarism’ and German war guilt (though
others had already begun questioning this long before in the 1930s). He even
claimed how liberated many soldiers on all sides felt to be in the trenches and
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away from their jobs in factories or mines, as well as the sense of comradeship
that such warfare engendered. This phenomenon was indeed mentioned by many
survivors, mostly notoriously by Benito Mussolini and his ‘trench aristocracy’ and
by many other interwar figures of the Right in Britain (notably Mosley and the
British Union of Fascists: Skidelsky, 1990), Germany (Jünger, 2004; Hitler,
1924/1939) and France (Wohl, 1979). So it must be admitted that the evidence
is quite strong that, in France and Germany at least, the ‘Generation of 1914’ did
not universally remember the war with horror and distaste, and for every book like
Henri’s Barbusse’s Le Feu (1916) and, after 1945, Roger Martin du Gard’s many
tomes, there were others, like Pierre Drieu la Rochelle’s La Bataille de Charleroi
(1915) and Jünger, who found war uplifting and renewing. We might also add the
interest shown by international historians and historians of ideas in the ‘modernist’
aspect of this war and the creation of the ‘new man’ (one recent brilliant addition
being Gentile, 2008, but see also Overy, 2009).
There has also been a spirited defence of the generals, especially Haig, by
various scholars, notably Gary Sheffield and its ‘forgotten victory’ (2002, 2011)
and Walter Reid (2006), who have written substantial biographies of Haig and
(in Sheffield’s case) edited Haig’s War Diaries (Sheffield, 2002, 2011; Bourne and
Sheffield, 2005; Reid, 2006). More populist writers like Gordon Corrigan have
made even more extravagant revisionist claims, as in his Mud, Blood and Poppycock
(2007).
The twentieth century in general and World War I in particular saw a large
number of new developments in the variety and scope of methods for effective
warfare against new populations. The much-criticized German ‘militarism’ of
the period during and after German unification in 1870 perhaps sums this up best.
In line with the previously described nineteenth-century military doctrine, the
German High Command coined a doctrine of ‘total warfare’ and Schrecklichkeit
(‘frightfulness’) in 1902, summed up in the Kriegsbrauche in Landkriege (‘The
custom of war in land warfare’) thus:
The conduct of war allows a belligerent state to employ any means which
will facilitate the accomplishment of the aim of war … A war waged with
energy cannot be directed solely against the combatants of the hostile state
and the positions which they defend, but will and should [sic] equally endeavour
to destroy the collective intellectual and material resources of the enemy.
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Such logic saw its full development on land in the battles of the Somme and
Verdun in 1916. They had seen their initial flowerings during the American
Civil War and in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. Hilaire Belloc, a prominent
Franco-British poet, intellectual and critic of Germany throughout his life (1870–
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1953) never forgot that his family home in France had been desecrated by German
troops in 1871 (Wilson, 1997: 9). In the same war, the French artist Camille Pissarro
found that most of his paintings from the studio he had had to flee in 1871 before
the same troops had been used by Prussian military butchers (the word is used here
in the culinary sense) as meat chopping boards, which is why there are few Pissarros
in existence from before that date.
Deliberate attacks on civilian targets were not a new feature in 1914–1918,
but they assumed much more horrific characteristics. Belloc was not alone in
seeing World Wars I and II as a struggle for the very soul of Western civilization,
and with some clear reason. The first deliberate German bombing raids on British
towns and cities took place in 1914 and there were plans, only stopped by the
Armistice of 1918, for effective fire-storm raids on London, raids which did take
place in World War II. As Prime Minister Baldwin said to the House of Commons
on 10 November 1932, ‘I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise
there is no power on earth that can protect him from bombing, whatever people
may tell him. The bomber will always get through … The only defence is in offence,
which means you have got you kill more women and children quicker than
the enemy if you want to save yourselves’ (Hanson, 2008: 454–455). But this led
the very self-proclaimed advocates of ‘civilization’ in London, Washington and else-
where to use the same policies of ‘frightfulness’ through the bombing of civilian
areas in Germany and Japan, with much greater effect in terms of casualties and
damage (British Bombing Survey Unit, 1998; Lindqvist, 2001).
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military historians, interested in both the personalities of generals on all sides, and
especially Dwight G. Eisenhower (also later US president) (Ambrose, 1983) and
field marshals Montgomery and Rommel (Kitchen, 2009), among others, as well as
in the politicians.
At the level of human agency there have been many biographies of Hitler
(Bullock, 1962; Kershaw, 1998, 2000a) and Stalin (most recently Boobbyer, 2000,
and Service, 2004) and even comparative biographies (Bullock’s [1991] dual biog-
raphy of Hitler and Stalin, and Overy, 2004). Churchill (Gilbert, 1992; Jenkins,
2001), Mussolini (Mack Smith, 2001) and Roosevelt (Freidel, 1990; Schlesinger,
1957–1960). Roosevelt’s intriguing way of doing business with Allies and the
American people as a whole has been seen as crucial in holding the ultimately odd
Alliance together (Dallek, 1979; Meacham, 2003). In recent times there have been
investigations into their private social circles (Montefiori [2005b], on Stalin). Last
but not least there has been the publication of the war diaries of key officials,
which throw light on the office politics they generated – the British version being
perhaps the most entertaining, with the Sir John Colville diaries (2004), and those
of Lord Alanbrooke (2001).
This next great system-changing war of the twentieth century took the develop-
ments of World War I to new depths of horror and promise – ‘horror’ because there
is no disagreement among respectable historians or IR commentators that the
systematic brutalization of populations by the German Nazi regime of 1933–1945
or, indeed, that by the Soviet Union before and after that period were terrible pro-
cesses to live through or witness. But the explanation of the rise of a totalitarian
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system has been the major aim of most historians. Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia,
and even Mao Tse-Tung’s China and lesser dictatorships, have been the extremist
touchstones of the last century, with Germany still being seen by most historians as
the greatest of warnings from history; As Kershaw puts it:
engineering.’
(Kershaw, 1998: xix–xx)
This equivalence of the two great authoritarian regimes has seen its apogee in
writing about ‘totalitarianism’ in general. Hannah Arendt is maybe the most
celebrated figure in this tendency (Arendt, 1958). J. L. Talmon traces this political
tendency back to the French Revolution and the idea of the ‘popular will’ (Talmon,
1952), a tradition that follows Edmund Burke’s condemnation of the same
revolution in 1792 (Burke, 1968). It could be argued that the French, Russian and
Chinese revolutions form a tradition of ‘popular’ revolution that gave birth to
socialism. This distinguishes them from the more ‘bourgeois’ revolutions of England
and the United States that led to liberal political systems with better checks and
balances to impede the rise of demagogues (Skocpol, 1979; Williams, in Chan
and Williams, 1994: part 2). For the emergence of a Nazi ‘empire’, see Chapter 5
and Mazower (2009a).
In explaining how Nazi Germany was able to unleash the horrors of World War
II, the majority of historians have concentrated upon either the emergence of the
Nazi and Soviet political systems or on the mechanisms that were used by that
system to dominate Europe during and after the war (in the case of Soviet Russia,
see Applebaum, 2003). In the first category are (among many others) Michael
Burleigh, Ian Kershaw and Richard Evans (Burleigh, 2000; Kershaw, 1998, 2000b;
Evans, 2003). Richard Evans has emphasized the role of the study of history itself
as a factor in the rise of an ultra-nationalist Germany, thus taking some blame
for the outbreak of both world wars (Evans, 1987, 2000a). Others have looked at
the cultural underpinnings and ironies of German cultural history: how can the
people who produced Beethoven, Kant and Goethe have also produced Adolf Hitler
and his ilk (Stern, 1974, 1999)?
The extensive literature on the most remarked upon single atrocity of the Nazi
period, the Holocaust (Hebrew ‘Shoah’ is often used interchangeably, as in Claude
Lanzmann’s magnificent documentary film of 1985) of the Jewish, homosexual
and Roma populations of Europe, including in Germany, merits a section on its own.
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There is so much that has been written about the events that made it up, especially
the period of the ‘Final Solution’ (Endlösung, the Nazi euphemism for the extermi-
nation of the Jews), that books have been written to guide the reader through the
maze of what has been written about it (good examples being Landau, 1998, 2006).
Though it is invidious to have to choose, Saul Friedländer’s Nazi Germany and the
Jews, 1933–1945 is usually accepted as the best overview (and now abridged in one
volume: Friedländer, 2009). It is the particular collision of two nationalisms, German
and Zionist, though not their equivalence, that gives the Holocaust its special mean-
ing for global history and still affects any discussion of European or Middle East
history (Laqueur, 2003; Fromkin, 2000; Fawcett, 2005). Any selection has to be
subjective and we have chosen to concentrate not so much on the ‘how’ but on the
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‘why’ aspects that have intrigued historians and what, if anything, can be said to
have come out of it that is not depressing.
There are many and varied versions and opinions about the ‘intentionality’ of the
Nazis to carry out the Holocaust, with a debate in particular as to whether Hitler’s
Mein Kampf of 1925/1926 (Hitler, 1939/1992) was in some ways a blueprint for
what became the ‘Final Solution’ (Yehuda, 2002; Friedländer, 2007). There are also
important commentaries on its domestic German roots (Goldhagen, 1997) and
even how Germans might be said to have overcome them (Stern, 1999). There is
also a ‘Holocaust denial’ literature in existence, though we will not dignify it with
too much attention (indeed, it would be illegal for us to discuss this in any German
edition of this book). One good summary of such views can be found in Lipstadt
(1993). It has unfortunately come to some public attention due to the pronounce-
ments of such pundits as Mahmoud Ahmedinejad (currently President of Iran) and
other notable anti-Semites.
Why was not more done to prevent it? Historians have tended to be scathing
about Allied non-efforts to help save the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust
(Gilbert, 1991). Saul Friedländer’s epoch-making Pius XII and the Third Reich
(Friedländer, 1966) roundly indicted the Catholic Church for its passivity faced
with the horror of Nazi actions (often reported to the Holy See by disgusted German
officers). The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Swiss government
had a wealth of knowledge of much that was going on in the extermination camps,
and refused entry to many Jewish Germans, with fatal consequences for them, as
Swiss historians have now amply documented in a Final Report and seven supple-
mentary volumes edited by Jean-François Bergier in 2002 (http://www.uek.ch/en/
index.htm). Britain’s record in helping the Jews before, during and after the
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Holocaust has not been seen in a very favourable light by some historians. In the
interwar period British policy on immigration was unclear (to say the least) and
that led to many Jewish Germans being denied entry (though many others were)
on the grounds that it would stimulate domestic anti-Semitism, being fanned
by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, a policy that was not relaxed even
during the war, when evidence of the Holocaust was as clear in Whitehall as it
was in Washington (Ceserani, 1998; London, 2001). French collaboration
with their Nazi occupiers is even better documented and condemned, being
described simply as ‘bad faith’ by Carmen Callil (Callil, 2006). Burrin and Calill’s
works on French views and actions towards French Jews make for difficult reading
and still have resonance in French political life. Friedländer lost his own parents to
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Auschwitz thanks to the French and Swiss authorities (Burrin, 1995; Friedländer,
2007).
There are also few grounds to muster to defend the Allies’ record towards
the Jews of Europe adequately. Joseph Persico’s account of Roosevelt’s intelligence
about Germany and Japan makes clear that the American and British administra-
tions had ample access to top-secret German, Italian and Japanese cipher traffic
that detailed the actions of the SS Sonderkommandos (special units) on the Eastern
Front as they butchered their way through the Jewish, Roma and homosexual
populations of their new conquests in their search to exterminate ‘degenerate
elements’, as well as the setting up of concentration and extermination camps
(Persico, 2001). Other Allied intelligence provided substantial supporting evidence
(Hinsley, 1988). Michael Beschloss emphasizes the Allied desire to end the war
as quickly as possible as a cover-all excuse for relative inaction on the camps, also
pointing to the difficulties of bombing such precise targets without killing those
who they were trying to help – there were no ‘smart’ bombs in 1943, and civilians,
even in non-German parts of Europe, were often unintended casualties of carpet-
bombing (Beschloss, 2002). But, mainly, the Holocaust was simply not seen as a
priority by Allied military and political planners.
Last but not least the Holocaust has to be seen as perhaps the best example of
the difficulties in history of remembering and forgetting. IR now has a burgeon-
ing literature on this topic, often applied to postwar reconciliation and the like
(Mac Ginty and Williams, 2009; Hayner, 2002; Rigby, 2001; Barkan, 2001). But
the great impellers of this writing have been World War I and the Holocaust.
Autobiographies of Holocaust survivors are our primary documents, along with
the physical evidence, with notable examples being those of Primo Levi and
Elie Wiesel (Levi, 2007; Wiesel and Wiesel, 2008) and collections (Whitworth,
2003; Zullo and Bovsun, 2005), but also in fictional accounts that try to explain
what the Holocaust meant by those who were or were not participants. A recent
moving attempt at this can be found in John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
(Boyne, 2007). But the ‘truth’ is one that is both too difficult for most people to
comprehend and certainly difficult to explain. Such are the emotions deployed
over these events that even those who wrote about them ‘toned them down a bit’ for
a general readership, leading to a lively debate about ‘truth and lies in Holocaust
fiction’ (Franklin, 2011).
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One might have hoped that the Holocaust had finally made anti-Semitism into an
unacceptable form of respectable political discourse, at least in the West among
liberals, though the rise of neo-Nazism seems to indicate that we cannot count
on that. Guilt among the Allied powers and a defeated Axis has led to the realization
of ‘genocide’ (the word was first used by Raphael Lemkin in 1944) being a unique
‘crime against humanity’. Others have reminded us that the term may be new,
but the practice is as old as human history (Kiernan, 2007). The very term ‘human
rights’ made its proper appearance in the aftermath of the Holocaust, though its
roots can be said to be far deeper (Forsythe, 2006). In concrete terms the aftermath
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of the war saw an American-led drive to get human rights higher up the global
agenda led by Roosevelt’s widow, Eleanor Roosevelt (Borgwardt, 2005), though
a cynic might see that agenda as having little traction during the Cold War years
of US–Soviet confrontation.
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(1990) and William Appleman Williams (1962), as using economic and military
and economic pressure for the same effect. Containment and its 1950s successor,
‘roll-back’, was then seen by these historians as part of an overall conspiracy by
what C. Wright Mills (1959) called the ‘Military Industrial Complex’ of the
United States against the rest of the planet. Daniel Yergin’s generally very sound
historical research is perhaps the best example of more moderate interpretations.
Yergin coined the phrase the ‘Riga Axiom’ to distinguish hard-line anti-Bolsheviks
(like Kennan) from those who believed that a reconciliation between the USSR
and the West had been possible after their cooperation in World War II. The more
benign group followed what Yergin called the ‘Yalta Axiom’ (Yergin, 1977).
In the ‘post-revisionist’ camp, a good point of departure is Louis Halle (1967)
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or indeed Gaddis himself (for a good survey of all three schools, see Leffler and
Painter, 1994; Dunbabin, 1994a; Maier, 1996; Gaddis, 1984; and for a rethink
of them, Westad, 2000). The Post-revisionists blamed both superpowers for
acting according to the rules of the Greek tragedy – that is, power diplomacy.
Louis Halle’s (1967) The Cold War as History and Diane Clemens’ (1970) Yalta are
models of their kind. They are essentially ‘realist’ interpretations based on sound
archival research. Caroline Kennedy-Pipe (1995) quarried the Russian archives
and concluded, against the revisionist school, that ‘US attitudes toward Moscow
were far from fixed in the spring of 1946’. Members of the Woodrow Wilson
Foundation’s Cold War project, directed by John Lewis Gaddis, also consulted
the Soviet archives. Gaddis is the dean of Cold War historians. His reflections
on the period in his (1997) We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History shed doubt
on the trenchant views of both revisionists and traditionalists alike.
A greater degree of perspective is now becoming possible. One of the lessons
of the system-transforming conflict is to see that it was, as Halle is quoted as saying,
‘a phenomenon not without precedent in the long history of international conflict;
a phenomenon that, experience has taught us, has its own dynamics; a phenomenon
that, typically, goes through a certain cycle with a beginning, a middle and an
end’ (Halle, quoted by Gaddis, 1997, vii) As Gaddis has also written, any new
Cold War history ‘will [have to] take ideas seriously’, for there is a pressing need
to show how ideas have evolved and to find a replacement discourse for that of
the Cold War. Ideology has turned again to ‘ideaology’. Along with Gaddis, students
might consult Cox’s (1998) Rethinking the Soviet Collapse, Booth’s (1998) Statecraft
and Security: The Cold War and Beyond, and Hogan’s (1992) The End of the Cold War:
Its Meanings and Implications.
It is now generally accepted that it was not one war, but rather an embedded
nest of incidents, crises and full-on wars, where the ‘superpowers’ (the United
States and the Soviet Union) never came to blows directly – mainly attributed
to them both being nuclear powers capable of ‘mutually assured destruction’ (with
the appropriate acronym, MAD).
It is also generally accepted that the root of all the problems lay in disagreements
over the division of Germany (Acheson, 1969; Kennan, 1968/1972; Deighton,
1993; Trachtenberg, 1999). Whether that can be attributed to disagreements over
reparations (Kuklick, 1972) or over wider arguments about spheres of influence that
went beyond Germany to include Greece, Iran and beyond (Trachtenberg, 1999 is
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a good introduction to this idea), the ‘front line’ of the Cold War was most
visibly ‘Check Point Charlie’ in Berlin, which has been immortalized in many
spy thrillers by John Le Carré and other novelists. The resulting incidents ranged
from disagreements about the division of power and influence in the different
sectors of Germany, starting with the Berlin Airlift (1948), the declaration of
a German Democratic Republic (GDR, 1949–1990; Fulbrook, 1995, 2005),
the setting up of the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO, 1949–present; Galambos et al., 1989) and continuing at various pitches
of hostility through the building of the Berlin Wall in 1963 (Gearson and Schake,
2002), through a gradual thaw known as ‘détente’, which culminated in the
signature of the ‘Helsinki Final Act’ of 1975 and went on till the Berlin Wall was
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dismantled in 1989 and Germany finally reunited in 1991 (for more on this, see
‘Peace’, Chapter 3).
There were other major conflicts, with a very destructive war in Korea (1950–
1953; Stueck, 1997) that saw American, British and other United Nations forces
in pitched battles against Chinese and North Korean troops. In Vietnam both
the French imperial authorities (1952–1954), and the Americans found themselves
losing a war of attrition against the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong (1964–1975;
Smith, 1987, 1988; Daum, Gardner and Mansbach, 2003). In Afghanistan (1981–
1988; Urban, 1988; Galeotti, 1995), the Soviet Union was finally forced to
withdraw after attempting to occupy the country in support of a puppet regime.
Other conflicts were long-lasting with, usually, the Soviet Union and its allies
backing one side and the United States and its allies backing the other, overtly
or covertly. This was the case in a number of African wars: Mozambique, Angola
and Namibia (1975–1989; Anderson, 2009) and Eritrea-Ethiopia (1963–1993
and 1998–2000; Negash and Tronvoll, 2001), though in these wars no other state
really backed Eritrea.
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Stanislavski, Eisenstein and Shostakovich, were all both stimulated by the Cold War
and victims of it in many ways (Scott-Smith and Krabbendam, 2003).
Soviet technological achievement (Jackson, 2001). This process had predated World
War II to some extent, with views ranging from British Prime Minister Lloyd
George, who talked in 1922 about ‘civilization though trade’; through US President
Herbert Hoover, who was in favour of trade but no diplomatic recognition of the
Soviet Union in 1928–1932; President Roosevelt, who advocated trade and recogni-
tion (Williams, 1992); and presidents after Roosevelt until 1990, who supported
CoCom (Mastanduno, 1992).
Postmodern war?
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‘the phenomenon of conflict and warfare is changing in ways that appear … funda-
mental’ (2001: 663–671). The fundamental dilemma of how to deal with war is
thus made even more acute by the possible changes within it.
But equally a liberal observer of war and peace could claim the opposite –
we have changed ‘the nature of domestic economic and political systems’ even if
only the most optimistic liberal would claim to be able to change ‘human nature’,
whatever that is taken to be. As Christopher Coker points out, the ‘historical
perspective’ of the average German after 1918 was that the ‘First World War did
not end … It continued on another front – the home front’ (1997). He points
to many wars not having been seen as ‘ending’, except in the view of those who
had won them, and to the confusion of the very concepts of peace and war, much
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as Blainey did (1988; see also Introduction to this volume). Coker’s answer is that
we have a very ‘nineteenth-century view of war’, ones that do ‘end’, usually with
a peace treaty, whereas most of the wars since then, and especially now, are the
products of ‘longstanding social conflicts’ that flare up and dissipate in accordance
with their own internal logic. We have, in other words, to understand why the
participants are fighting their wars (Coker, 1997: 616–617, 626–627). We might
even take Coker’s logic further and ask if the idea of any ‘end’ is an illusion, a view
proposed by Jean Baudrillard (1994).
As generals get ready to fight the last war, so we as analysts get ready to project the
‘lessons’ of the last war on to the next. The best-known example of this is that
the ‘lessons’ of the Treaty of Versailles were learned in the preparation of the end
of World War II (Macmillan, 2001). Likewise, in the 1950s the further ‘lesson’
was learned that the betrayal of small states at Munich by the powers of the time in
1938 had led to the appeasement of dictators, and that this should never happen
again. This lesson was then visited on the Soviet Union, which could not be appeased
but had to be ‘contained’ or even ‘rolled back’, and on countries in the developing
world, like Egypt, where Prime Minister Anthony Eden famously compared
President Nasser to Hitler (Lucas, 1991, 1996). In August 2002, George Bush Jr’s
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice used the same kind of analogy about
President Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
In the 1990s, the lessons of the last war(s) had to be learned bewilderingly
fast. The intervention in Somalia in 1991–1992 taught the international commu-
nity that it was rash to intervene in ‘civil wars’. It was then decided that the wars
in the former Yugoslavia (1992–1999) were largely of the civil war variety, in spite
of much argument to the contrary. It is arguably the case that we will now ‘learn
the lessons’ of Bosnia and Kosovo, as well as those of Afghanistan and then project
them on to our attempts to end the next war, wherever that may be (Iran is a prob-
able contender at the time of writing). Perhaps it could be said that the West in
particular is looking at the wars in the former Soviet Union, especially in Chechnya,
and in the Middle East (against Iraq), for such lessons. One policy response has
been to declare that there is now a global terrorist conspiracy led by ‘rogue states’
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(the American list has officially included, Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Syria) and by
a religious fanatical organization led by Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network.
This, it might be said, is a classic projection of Western views of the ‘other’, in this
case Islam – a view hotly contested by some and supported by many others. Equally,
understanding why the United States and its ‘coalition’ in Iraq has been so resented
locally can be better elucidated by reading even the work of Western historians
on Iraq, and that is before we consider what local historians might further explain.
As Sir Jeremy Greenstock – Britain’s Ambassador to the United Nations in 2003
and UK Special Representative in Iraq, 2003–2004 – has asked: ‘Is it too churlish
to ask whether the leaders of a more modern administration might have profited
from studying [former] experience?’ (quoted by Nunn, 1932/2007: 7–8).
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There has been much written about the difficulties encountered by the American-
led coalition since 2003. Some of these writings, like Ali A. Allawi’s The Occupation
of Iraq (2007), give a detailed, if somewhat biased, view of the background to the
invasion, with brief references to the British involvement during and after World
War I. Others, as in David Philips’ Losing Iraq (2005), concentrate on the internal
debates within the US Administration about what information to use in planning
the invasion and its aftermath. Revolt on the Tigris, by Mark Etherington (2005),
the British Administrator in Wasit Province in Southern Iraq after the invasion of
2003, gives a graphic view from the British side. Equally, if not more, interesting
are those by Vice-Admiral Wilfrid Nunn, Commander in Chief British Naval
Forces in the south of what became Iraq in 1914–1917, whose 1932 classic, Tigris
Gunboats, has recently been republished (Nunn, 1932/2007), and a book by a
Norwegian historian of the early period of British occupation after World War I,
Reidar Visser (2005). Nunn’s book is a tale of massive disillusion and defeat
and inevitably draws the eye, as the names of so many places that have figured
in our own headlines since 2003 are reported here – Baghdad, Nasiriya, Basra,
etc. Visser’s breathtaking range of sources (in Arabic, English, French and Ottoman
Turkish) is drawn from many archives. What he found was that the elites of the
1920s were tempted into breaking up Iraq for economic and political reasons,
whereas the majority of the ordinary populace wanted the surer protection of a
central Iraqi authority based in Baghdad. The supporters of nationalism tended to
be younger, often from the more highly educated sections of the populace, and,
most significantly, Visser concluded that the Shia were not huge fans of the idea.
Equally, the British were suspected by many locals of wanting Basra to break away
so that they could consolidate their grasp on the whole Gulf, a claim that Visser
says was true to some extent but not ultimately the view that prevailed in Whitehall
(Visser, 2005: chapters 6, 11).
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‘Inevitability’
It is commonplace to read that such and such a war was ‘inevitable’. Hence John
Stoessinger’s classic on war starts with an account of the opening gambits of World
War I. War was inevitable, said German Army Chief of Staff General Helmut
Von Moltke, so ‘the sooner the better for us’. As Stoessinger comments, ‘[t]he
theme of inevitability is a haunting and pervasive one’ (2007: 1). Hence, also, one
of the mainstay texts of basic undergraduate IR states that the Cold War was:
would shape the primary conflicts of the years to follow. No matter what those
settlements contained, some of the involved parties would be dissatisfied and
their dissatisfaction would be the basis of future conflicts.
(Ray, 1992: 43)
The same war was described by the historian Louis Halle as representing an
‘historical necessity’. But it could be said, as do other historians, that the Cold
War was in no way seen until around 1946 as ‘inevitable’.
During World War II, many in the United States held the view that in the
postwar period the main problem for peace would be the persistence of the British
and French empires, and that the Soviet Union would work more or less harmoni-
ously with the United States to preserve global order. Robert Skidelsky (2000)
demonstrates that Harry Dexter White, main architect with John Maynard Keynes
of what became the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund at the Bretton
Woods conference in 1944, was absolutely convinced that the USA could work
very successfully with Moscow. It is now apparent that White was actually passing
information about the discussions with the British to Moscow through acquain-
tances in the American Communist Party. It could even be argued that Roosevelt
held similar, if not so extreme, views about the viability of postwar US–British
collaboration (Skidelsky, 2000).
The analyst therefore runs the risk of reading history backwards, in other
words assuming that the current thinking about the Cold (or any other) War is
that which was held at the time. Stoessinger agrees, on the grounds that, since it
is ‘mortals’ that make decisions, everything about them is contingent – they
are motivated by fright, misperception and they make decisions, which leads to
unforeseen consequences (Stoessinger, 2007: 2).
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Keegan, John (1976) The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the
Somme. London: Penguin.
Keegan, John (1994) A History of Warfare. New York: Vintage.
Sassoon, Siegfried (1974) Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. London: Faber and Faber
(memoirs of a British infantry officer on the Western Front, 1914–1918).
Online resources
Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, revised edition, ed. M. I. Finley,
trans. Rex Warner. London: Penguin. At: http://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/
pelopwar.html
Sallust, The Jugurthine War: http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_text_
sallust_jugurth_1.htm
For a contemporary account of Clausewitz, see Barry D. Watts (2004), Clausewitzian
Friction and Future War at: www.clausewitz.com/readings/Watts-Friction3.pdf
To trace British military personnel of World War I, see: http://www.greatwar.co.uk/
westfront/resources/trace.htm
The University of Oxford’s World War I digital poetry archive (which has much
more than poetry, including some information on French and Canadian archives)
at: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/education/online/family-history.html
Duncanson, Bruce (2002) The Great War: On Line Resources, Organization
of American Historians Magazine of History, 17(1), World War I (October),
70–71. http://maghis.oxfordjournals.org/content/17/1.toc.pdf
Pictures and documents of US–Japan Peace Negotiations, 1945: http://www.jacar.
go.jp/english/nichibei/negotiation/index.html
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CHAPTER 3
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Peace
INTRODUCTION
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once poured scorn on one of our most presti-
gious universities for having the temerity to open a Department of Peace Studies.
An article on the background to that controversy of the 1980s, the second head
of that Department at the University of Bradford, James O’Connell, recalled that
‘the Prime Minister had more than once asked her officials: “Has that depart-
ment been dealt with yet?” ’ (Peace Magazine, 1997: 20). One of her objections lay
in what she saw as the far less serious enterprise, maybe even subversive, aim of
analysing the conditions necessary for peace, rather than in the much more impor-
tant understanding of the necessary ways to wage war. But discussing peace invari-
ably means thinking about war. The Roman military writer Flavius Vegetius
recognized this inherent paradox almost two thousand years ago. More recently,
Geoffrey Blainey has argued that ‘war and peace are alternating phases of a rela-
tionship’ (Blainey, 1988). Blainey’s work The Causes of War is symptomatic of this
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linking of war and peace; war nearly always precedes peace (as in this book), and
is also why the motto of an organization which had the capability to destroy the
world many times over during the Cold War was ‘Peace is our profession’.
This chapter investigates the relationship between war and peace and why
peace is often considered as an afterthought to war. There is a compelling case for
the exploration of peace in its own right.
In line with the overall aims of this volume, the focus of this chapter is to provide
an understanding of peace, and its appropriate historical context. The strength of
an historical framework in contemplating peace lies particularly in our belief that
it allows multiple accounts to be presented and better expresses the contradictions
and complexity of bringing it about, a central concern of theorists and practitioners
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of international relations since the inception of the discipline. Hence this chapter
will build upon the previous concentration on war and show how these two key
concepts intertwine. The analysis begins by explaining the differences in under-
standing peace by a contemplation of the classical distinction within international
relations scholarship between liberalism and realism. We will then explore the
relationship between peace and ‘justice’, and later peace and ‘democracy’ while
asking: Is peace the normal state of affairs? and: Is peace invented? In contemplating
these questions we will firstly focus upon the contributions of British military
historian Sir Michael Howard (1922–) and Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant
(1724–1804) as two exemplars of our changing understanding of peace.
The chapter will then reflect on the development of the post-Westphalian
system of states (1648 onwards) in international relations and its apparent propen-
sity for war, which culminated in World War I (1914–1918). In the aftermath of
the horrors of that conflict, many organizations hoped to make good on David
Lloyd George’s boast (though it has also been ascribed to Woodrow Wilson and
H. G. Wells) that this was the ‘war to end all wars’. The establishment of institu-
tions like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International
Relations (‘Chatham House’), and indeed the founding of the League of Nations
and the academic discipline of international relations, are just a few examples of
a new impetus for peace (Olson and Groom, 1991: chapter 4; Cortright, 2008).
The peace settlement that followed has been subject to a vast range of different
interpretations, at the time and since. These interpretations are examined and
provide insights into the broader discussions of war and peace that took place in
the ‘interwar period’ (1919–1939). That this twenty-year passage of time earns
the title ‘interwar’ – as an interlude – is indicative of how far the two world wars
overshadow the peace, in its many forms, that characterizes the period. It is also
indicative of the language of war that is used to describe peace: we hear of ‘peace
Offensives’, ‘peace Enforcement’ and ‘peacekeeping’ that may involve the tools
of military force most often associated with ‘war’ fighting. Perhaps the most
common – and also somewhat oxymoronical use of the language of war in the
twentieth century is that used for ‘Cold War’, yet this contest between the US-led
West and the Soviet-led East that dominated international relations in the latter
half of the twentieth century is also known as the ‘Long Peace’ (Gaddis, 1987,
discussed subsequently).
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The chapter will then outline the efforts that were made during World War II
to achieve distinct war and peace aims. In microcosm this period illustrated
that they are not mutually exclusive phenomena, but that the relationship
between them shifts across time and space so that they may be usefully considered
in a symbiotic manner. We conclude by looking at the state of peace in its post-
Cold War context, where its relationship with war has reached new levels of
intimacy.
Given the scope of peace in both History and International Relations, this
chapter cannot provide universal coverage. Instead its analysis of peace in history
aims to provide insights into comprehension of International Relations and
International History in the twenty-first century. George W. Bush was much lam-
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pooned for his language while forty-second president of the United States, but
his remark of 18 June 2002 captures succinctly the difficulties faced here in distin-
guishing between peace and war: ‘I just want you to know that, when we talk
about war, we’re really talking about peace.’ The essential point is to recognize
a synergistic and overlapping relationship between peace and war. A raft of issues
cross over the two phenomena, as we shall see. To begin our discussion on the place
of peace in history, we move from a recent former United States president to the
first.
PEACE IN HISTORY
In his first State of the Union address of 8 January 1790, President George
Washington stated that ‘To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means
of preserving peace’ (Washington, 1790). But for many, peace is a simple phenom-
enon: it can be seen as the state of affairs when there is no war. Equally it is often
seen as a utopia (Durrheim, 1997: 38–42) and derided for its quixotic nature
(Morgenthau, 1945: 145). But understanding peace and its place in history requires
us to look at it in a number of ways.
As with the opening to the discussion in Chapter 2 (‘War’), a discussion of peace
begins by considering the level of analysis, and what international relations scholars
call ‘actors’ in the international system. By this we mean ‘who’ is involved when
we talk of peace. The nation-state is the cornerstone of much analysis in International
Relations, and its relation with peace will be discussed in due course, but the
identification of the immutable causes of war, and the absence of peaceful solutions,
can and often does lead us to the nature of the human condition (Van Evera, 1999:
1–2). International Relations scholarship often recognizes a delineation which trans-
lates human nature into a divide between realism and liberalism, where the former
emphasizes aggressive qualities and conflict, while the latter plays on humanity’s
kinship and cooperation (Carr, 1939/1947; Dunne, Schmidt and Lamy, 2010:
63–91). Many commentators have concluded that war is an inevitable consequence
of the human condition; wars happen because (some) people are violent and
warlike (Walt, 1998: 31; Wendt, 1995: 75; Dunne, Schmidt, and Lamy, 2010: 71).
In much the same way, ordinary parlance often suggest that there are two
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types of people: ‘warmongers’ and ‘peaceniks’ or ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’, and invariably
we can recognize that elements of both types of tendency exist within us all.
Theories about the human condition are also influential in psychological
studies of war and peace (Ashley, 1981; Mercer, 1995). Being told that your
nation is ‘at war’ brings with it a raft of expectations as to what will follow. Michael
Howard identifies a ‘psychosis of war’, suggesting that it arouses ‘an immediate
expectation, and demand, for spectacular military action against some easily identi-
fiable adversary, preferably a hostile state; action leading to decisive results’ (Howard,
2001: 1). In the contemporary world, while politicians and a ‘rolling news’ media,
intentionally or otherwise, magnify being ‘at war’, there are also implications for
peace. Simply, this is to emphasize a distinction between times of war and times
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of peace. The former heightens the senses, acknowledging the possibility for dynamic
change to the status quo, while the latter implies order and stability. As we have
already suggested, such a distinction is not always possible, or even desirable,
for increasing our understanding of either phenomenon. It is therefore necessary
to acknowledge that the language of war and peace is evident in everyday society
and that figures in the worlds of politics, religion, media, sport and elsewhere all
use metaphors of both ‘war’ and ‘peace’ to convey their message. As an example,
with World War II imminent in 1939, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of
Information, as part of a campaign to stiffen resolve, prepared a poster for
public display that stated ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’. By implication, the
message was that, in the event of war, and then possible British defeat at the hands
of Nazi Germany, Britons should maintain their peacetime approach as the most
effective means of contributing to victory. This approach reflected a widely
held view in Whitehall at the outset of the war that the British people would be
distraught at the prospect of defeat brought about by German attack. As events
unfolded through to the summer of 1940, the government went to particular
efforts to illustrate how exceptional the United Kingdom’s plight was as it sought to
galvanize the country to triumph in the Battle of Britain (Churchill, 1949; Seib,
2006).
The old adage ‘Where you stand is where you sit’ is true in many aspects of
life and is evident in how we consider peace both in terms of human nature and
of history. The history of nationalist movements in the twentieth century, associ-
ated with political violence and revolution, is populated by those who considered
themselves to be ‘at war’ while other protagonists consider themselves to be acting
peacefully in maintaining the existing order (as an example, Algerians seeking
independence fought a bloody eight-year campaign against French Armed Forces
before securing their goal in 1962) (Horne, 1978). The contrast between the
perceptions of different parties raises questions as to the importance of power in
being able to establish, maintain and enforce peace set against those who are seeking
change.
Not all peace is ‘peaceful’. Elsewhere in this volume, Rome’s empire and its
wars are discussed, but it is also instructive to consider how it sought to establish
peace. The inhabitants of Carthage at the end of the Punic Wars felt the full force
of Roman peace. They were either killed or forced into slavery as their city was
razed to the ground. Put simply, not everything referred to as peace is ‘peaceful’.
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The term originates in describing the Roman Empire’s imposition of a brutal and
devastating peace upon the Phoenician city of Carthage at the end of the Punic
Wars in 146 BCE. Subsequently the term has been used to describe peace settle-
ments where the terms of peace are imposed by the victor on the vanquished.
The Treaty of Versailles 1919 (q.v.) was considered by some, including the famous
British economist John Maynard Keynes, to be a Carthaginian peace because
of their reading of its harsh and prescriptive terms (it earned the moniker of being
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Here, another important link can be made to the concept of justice and its rela-
tionship with peace, given its implications for the moral status of individuals,
peoples and states. The ‘peace’ that the Carthaginians were subject to may not
have been ‘just’ in their eyes. Nor was the peace that the German people were
subject to after World War I ‘just’ according to Adolf Hitler. He railed against the
Diktat, as the Treaty of Versailles was known in Germany, in his rise to power
(Kershaw, 1998: 148). And the absence of justice in the peace meant many beyond
Germany’s borders acquiesced in ‘appeasement’ during the 1930s as Hitler moved
against the peace settlement (Kershaw, 2000a: xxxvi). The two key elements of just
war theory, jus in bello and jus ad bellum (q.v.) have been joined in recent times by
the notion of jus post bellum (postwar ‘justice’) (Orend, 2007; Stahn and Kleffner,
2008; Williams and Caldwell, 2006). While the challenge of demarcating what is
considered to be ‘war’ and what ‘peace’ is recurrent in this chapter, one interesting
feature in furthering our understanding of peace is that the criteria for the ending of
war align with the criteria for those before and during war (‘proportionality’ and
‘intent’, for example). In other words, what is ‘just’ in engaging in war is ‘just’ at
other times, too. Seen also in the body of law that constitutes the Laws of Armed
Conflict (LOAC), this is recognition that the conduct of war influences what fol-
lows: war can ‘bleed’ in many different, and often unexpected, directions and thus
shape the peace and, importantly, subsequent wars. This will be seen later in this
chapter, particularly in relation to the views of Immanuel Kant and the influence of
World War I on the peace that followed.
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An armistice signals the end of war fighting signalling the cessation of hostilities.
This may not mean the formal end of the conflict. An armistice may be broken
and fighting resume. Armistices may be pre-empted by a truce or ceasefire, and
followed by a peace settlement or agreement, which formally bring an end
to conflict. The most widely recognized and commemorated armistice is the
one which brought the end of fighting in World War I that came into effect
at 11.00 a.m. on 11 November 1918 (leading to the phrase ‘the eleventh hour
of the eleventh day of the eleventh month’). The Armistice was signed by Com-
mander in Chief of Allied Forces, Frenchman Marshal Ferdinand Foch and Matthias
Erzberger, the German representative, in Foch’s railway carriage in the Compiègne
Forest. In June 1940, Adolf Hitler, the German chancellor, received the French ar-
mistice in the same location after Germany’s defeat of France. Other armistices of
note include the one that brought a cessation to active hostilities in the Korean
War of 1950–1953. This armistice has held for almost sixty years, but has never
been followed up by a peace treaty, and so in some respects considered in this
chapter the war has not ended.
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with the settlement being known by the location of that event. The negotiations
involved in reaching agreement are concluded in various fashions: ‘final acts’,
‘protocols’, ‘exchanges of notes’, ‘accords’, ‘agreements’ and, most commonly,
‘treaties’. Well-known peace settlements include the Congress of Vienna (1815),
which brought an end to the Napoleonic Wars, and the Treaty of Versailles (1919),
which formally ended the state of war between the Allied powers and imperial
Germany at the end of World War I (Boemeke, Feldman and Gläser, 1998).
(Other treaties were signed subsequently with the other Central Powers at the
end of the conflict: Austria – Treaty of Saint-Germain, September 1919; Bulgaria
– Treaty of Neuilly, November 1919; Hungary – Treaty of Trianon, June 1920;
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and the Ottoman Empire – Treaty of Sèvres, August 1920, and then revised in
the Treaty of Lausanne, July 1923). An example of a peace settlement known
as an accord is the 1995 General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia
and Herzegovina, which brought a resolution to the conflict in the region.
The agreement is commonly referred to as the Dayton Peace Accords. The Oslo
Accords, or the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrange-
ments, made a contribution to the resolution to the Palestinian–Israeli conflict in
1993 as part of the wider Arab–Israeli peace process (q.v.).
This reading of history would seem to suggest that war and peace inhabit differ-
ent worlds. Mary Dudziak argues that wars and peace have been identified as
discrete entities on the basis of time. In turn, this means distinct forces are at
work during ‘wartime’ and ‘peacetime’. Her analysis makes the point that the
beginnings of wars bring with them ideas about them ending, through the coming
of peace. Dudziak’s particular focus is the application of laws that come into force
during times of war that have a limited lifespan. By way of example, during World
War II, President Franklin Roosevelt told Congress in 1942 that ‘[w]hen the war
is won, the powers under which I act automatically revert to the people – to
whom they belong’ (Dudziak, 2010: 1670; Rosenman, 1950: 356–365). The
powers Roosevelt used once the United States was at war, which included interning
Japanese-American citizens, were those brought on by the crisis of war. However,
many lingered into peacetime in the late 1940s and some became formalized in the
National Security Act of 1947 (Stuart, 2008).
By then the world was facing a different challenge pertinent to our discussion
of peace: the Cold War. As we saw in Chapter 2, historians, of different eras and
varying political persuasions, have long disagreed about the origins of the con-
flict between the United States and the Soviet Union that dominated the geopoliti-
cal landscape of the latter half of the twentieth century. The ‘dean’ of Cold War
historians, John Lewis Gaddis, entitled his 1987 book The Long Peace: Inquiries
into the History of the Cold War (Gaddis, 1987). He makes the point that the
Cold War had many of the characteristics of peace: the absence of large-scale
conflicts and casualties between the major protagonists; agreements on weapons
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control (the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, 1972), trade (the US–Soviet Trade
Agreement, 1972) and Human Rights (Helsinki Accords, 1975). During most of
the period after 1945, peace can be considered as war, albeit a ‘cold’ war.
Equally, declared war can appear peaceful. The outbreak of World War II in
Europe saw German and Soviet forces invade and conquer Poland between 1
September and 6 October 1939. The Western Allies of France and Great Britain had
responded by declaring war on 3 September, yet there was no fighting on the
European continent between the Allies and Germany until the spring of 1940. The
period between October and April was referred to as the ‘phony war’ (Lukacs, 1976;
Smart, 2003). This reflected the standoff that ensued, particularly the absence of
fighting of the mode that took place on the Western Front during World War I.
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It is nonetheless important to nuance the view that the Cold War was a ‘long
peace’. Gaddis’s outlook puts a good deal of emphasis on looking at the Cold
War through a ‘Western’ and ‘European’ lens; but international history takes
place over a broader geographical and temporal space. An alternative view is put
forward by Odd Arne Westad in his Global Cold War: Third World Interventions
and the Making of our Times. Westad argues that the battlefield of the Cold War,
where casualties were high and conflict not restrained by the spectre of Mutually
Assured Destruction, was the ‘Third World’, i.e. ‘the former colonial or semi-
colonial countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America that were subject to European
… economic or political domination’ (Westad, 2006: 3). The discussion of the
Cold War as ‘war’ or ‘peace’ thus illustrates the difficulties in demarcating between
war and peace on the basis of language and distinct periods of time: peace is more
than just the space between wars.
Throughout history, and especially in contemporary wars, the line between what
constitutes peace and war has been blurred. As we have seen, Dudziak argues that
‘wartimes bleed into each other’ (2010: 1672) and, we would argue here, so does
peace. As war has an influence beyond ‘wartime’, peace has an influence beyond
peacetime. The attempts to have rules for the conduct of war draw, to a greater or
lesser degree, on peacetime notions that, for society to thrive and function, there are
conventions that should be adhered to. (Examples include the Ottawa Treaty on
Anti-Personnel Mines and the Law of Armed Conflict.)
Essentially, the point to be made is that thinking about war and peace should not
be as mutually exclusive concepts. Indeed, International History offers further alter-
natives. Peace may also be considered as episodic or as a process. In the case of the
former, often with war apparently the binary alternative, swift diplomatic action
may be called for. In such circumstances individuals are often called upon to under-
take peace missions as envoys of peace. Peace missions seeking to bring some mea-
sure of resolution to conflict may be either private or public affairs in terms of their
public profile and/or the makeup of those participating. Those heading undertaking
a peace mission are often referred to as a peace envoy. An example of a prominent
‘peace envoy’ in recent times is US Senator George Mitchell. Mitchell, a judge in
Maine, and then the state’s Senator for fifteen years up to 1995, became, by appoint-
ment of President Bill Clinton, the United States Special Envoy for Northern
Ireland. Mitchell’s role was critical in working with all parties and securing the 1998
Good Friday Agreement which marked a major step towards ending the ‘Troubles’
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that had blighted Northern Ireland for over thirty years (Mitchell, 1999). Almost
ten years after leaving this post, and just two days into his presidency, Barack Obama
appointed Mitchell as United States Special Envoy for the Middle East.
As we have already learned, peace is rarely clear-cut. One peace settlement
which may appear to bring closure may prove to be just a hiatus as the embers
of conflict reignite. Acknowledging this, certain conflicts, and the efforts towards
their resolution, have earned the term ‘peace process’. Often applied retrospectively,
this is used to describe long-standing, apparently intractable conflicts over funda-
mental issues that transcend generations. They operate without fixed beginnings
and ends. Peace processes can create and maintain momentum: a key feature
of diplomatic negotiation (Berridge, 2010: 56). Examples of peace processes can
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be found in addressing conflicts in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. In the
case of Middle East, the peace process there refers to the moves that have been
made to end the Arab–Israeli conflict since the mid-1970s. A number of ‘peace
agreements’ have been reached during this period – between Israel and Egypt
(1979) and Israel and Jordan (1994) – and numerous peace conferences at a variety
of diplomatic levels held – the Camp David meetings hosted by US President Jimmy
Carter (1978), the Madrid Conference sponsored by the US and the USSR (1991),
the ‘back-channel’ meetings between Israel and the Palestinians that led
to the Oslo Accords (1993), the summit back at Camp David hosted by President
Bill Clinton (2000) and the Annapolis Conference, which saw mutual agreement
on an outline for a two-state solution (2007). The United States has played a key
role in the Middle East peace process, acting as mediator and instigator. Since 2002,
alongside the United Nations, the European Union and Russia – the quartet – have
worked on a ‘road map’ for peace. The situation on the ground remains tense, and
violent episodes ranging from isolated acts of terrorism and retaliation to full mili-
tary operations have typified the peace process: the First (1987–1992) and Second
(2000–) Intifadas and the Lebanon war (2006) are examples.
In Northern Ireland the term ‘peace process’ was initially used to describe
events leading up to the Irish Republican Army’s ceasefire in 1994 as a measure
of resolution to the ‘Troubles’ that blighted the region from the 1960s until the
1990s (Gilligan, 1997). The peace process led to the Northern Ireland Peace
Agreement, also known as the Good Friday Agreement, given the day it was
signed: 10 April 1998 (the document can be found at http://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/
attached_files/Pdf%20files/NIPeaceAgreement.pdf ). The term ‘Northern Ireland
Peace Process’ has subsumed many of the subsequent moves (decommissioning
of weapons) that have contributed to a more peaceful region. The peace process
is considered by some to have ‘ended’ in the spring of 2007, with a joint government
being formed by the two main parties (Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist
Party). However, sporadic acts of terrorist violence do continue.
‘Inventing’ peace
As Michael Howard has put it, ‘[t]hroughout human history mankind has been
divided between those who believe that peace must be preserved, and those who
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believe that it must be attained’ (Howard, 2000: 6). This military historian begins
The Invention of Peace by referring to the work of Sir Henry Maine, the jurist
and historian (1822–1888). He quotes Maine as stating that ‘War appears to be
as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention.’ In his exploration of the
relationship between war and peace Howard states clearly that peace ‘is certainly
a far more complex affair than war’ (Howard, 2000: 2). It is clear that he believes
peace is either worth protecting or worth striving for. Christopher Coker writes
of Howard’s work that it has ‘a passion for peace informed by an understanding
that to build peace one has to understand war fully’ (Coker, 2001: 78).
Using the classical IR distinction we can identify the realist view of peace as
‘when war was neither imminent nor actually being fought’ as negative peace, in
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contrast to Howard’s positive peace indicating a ‘social and political ordering of soci-
ety that is generally accepted as just’ (Howard, 2000: 2). We can term the value
added as Peace Plus. Efforts to strive for and maintain such a positive peace have a
chimerical quality: peace requires careful management. Clearly evident in Howard’s
work, as he provides an openly Western-orientated account, is the influence of
Enlightenment thinking. For Howard, within this body of thought one individual
stands out and that is Immanuel Kant: ‘if anyone could be said to have invented
peace as more than a mere pious aspiration, it was Kant’ (Howard, 2000: 31).
The Preliminary Articles described the steps that should be taken immediately, or
with all deliberate speed:
• ‘No secret treaty of peace shall be held valid in which there is tacitly
reserved matter for a future war.’
• ‘No independent states, large or small, shall come under the dominion of
another state by inheritance, exchange, purchase, or donation.’
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Three Definitive Articles would provide not merely a cessation of hostilities, but a
foundation on which to build a peace.
Kant’s essay laid out six Preliminary and three Definite articles which, if enacted,
could respectively reduce the likelihood of war and bring about a permanent peace.
Kant’s articles were, and remain, ambitious but it is worth noting how much prog-
ress has been made in the intervening decades since his ‘Philosophical Sketch’ was
published. In respect of the Preliminary Articles, there is an acceptance of open
diplomacy in contrast to secret treaty-making; a repudiation of Empire; while stand-
ing armies do exist, disarmament is prominent in international affairs; the UN
Charter guards against foreign interference in ‘matters which are essentially within
the domestic jurisdiction of any state’; the idea of just war and the Laws of Armed
Conflict mitigate to a degree wartime practices; though it is fair to say that incurring
debts have been a recurrent feature of the prosecution of wars in the twentieth
century. With regard to the first of the Definite Articles, Kant’s aim for each nation
to have a republican constitution has become increasingly prevalent, although
a debate exists about how Kant saw the relationship between Republican and
Democratic forms of government (which will be discussed presently). Of the
second and third articles, the world has moved towards a ‘federation of free states’
– a League of Peace – in the form of the United Nations organization; and the
rise of a human rights agenda in international politics is testament to the humanitar-
ian concerns Kant raised. This is not to give Kant foresight that is not deserved: in
the twenty-first century we do not have perpetual peace. There are numerous forces
that mean the prospect is not imminent, but if nothing else the idea of perpetual
peace is something that was given particular impetus by Kant and something that
has a definite legacy in today’s international affairs.
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Democratic peace
do not fight wars against each other. ‘What is more,’ John Owen IV argues,
‘much research suggests that they are also unusually likely to sign and honor inter-
national agreements and to become economically interdependent’ (Owen, 2005).
Taken further, the logic of this argument is that if all states were democracies
there would be no war amongst them, and universal peace would follow. The
empirical evidence available bears out this line of thought. The major global
conflicts of the twentieth century are characterized by democracies on the one
side and tyrannical regimes on the other. Of course, the potential flaw in this
analysis is that it does depend on what you consider a democracy to be; and it
is on this that much of the debate about democratic peace has centred (Chan,
1997).
The link between the democratic peace and Kantian thinking was made explic-
itly by Michael Doyle in two 1983 articles which stressed how foreign relations
amongst liberal democracies had been pacified to the point that war was barely
thinkable (Doyle, 1983a, 1983b). In the case of Western Europe, for centuries
riven by conflict, this was borne out. Political scientist Jack Levy’s much-quoted
remarks that the democratic peace ‘comes as close as anything we have to an
empirical law in international relations’ (Levy, 1988: 662) point to an unusual level
of consensus amongst academics on the issue. Importantly, in the world of policy
the premise of the democratic peace has taken hold. By the turn of the twenty-
first century, democracy was for some the sine qua non for peace long before the
George W. Bush administration’s openly stated policy of democracy promotion
as the means to secure national security. Christopher Layne argues that US policy-
makers have been captivated by the democratic peace approach in seeing ‘a link
between American security and the spread of democracy, which is viewed as an
antidote that will prevent future wars’ (Layne, 1994: 5).
The approach has been critiqued in recent times by those who argue that it is
not a democratic peace but one based on economic liberalization that promotes
peace, and that the latter has a stronger historical record than the liberal demo-
cratic peace per se (McDonald, 2009). In The Invisible Hand of Peace, McDonald
identifies ‘liberal economic institutions – namely, the predominance of private
property and competitive market structures within domestic economies’ as funda-
mental to peace (McDonald, 2009: 5). Owen points to the importance of the
liberal character of states that coexist in peace and that these are not always synony-
mous with democracy (Owen, 1997), arguing that it is liberal ideas allied to strong
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liberal institutions (the rule of law) that matter in states remaining at peace. Other
critics would argue that democracy may make peace less likely. Mansfield and
Snyder’s point to the history of states transitioning to democracy as one which is
replete with bellicose activity, regardless of whether the state eventually becomes a
full-blown democracy (Mansfield and Snyder, 2005).
It is somewhat curious that the literature on the democratic peace, even allowing
for its variations, and accepting its critique from realist quarters, is notable for its
lack of optimism. Instead pessimism that peace is anything more than a utopian
dream seems to have overwhelmed the aspiration of Kant’s writings since the end
of the eighteenth century. As such, it speaks to Owen’s analysis that liberal states
need an ‘other’ – illiberal states help to define liberal states. Nonetheless, there
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has been a huge rise in the number of states that can be reasonably described as
democratic in the past sixty years, and with that many who feel that in the period
the world has come ‘closer than ever before to reaching a consensus … that only
democracy confers legitimacy’ (Gaddis, 2005: 265).
Charles Tilly’s maxim that ‘war made states and vice versa’ (1990: 67) provides
an important dimension to the study of international relations and international
history. Yet, the nation-state has also played a notable role in our understanding
of peace. The peaces of Munster and Westphalia of 1648 were peace agreements
which recognized the principle of sovereignty.
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were not restricted to 1648, with many of the delegations arriving from 1643
before the negotiations drew down in 1649. The net outcome of the treaty
was that the princes of the Holy Roman Empire were given equal status and
allowed to choose the religious denomination of their state, thus recognizing the
principle of sovereignty over their own territory.
These agreements are a key marker for students and scholars of IR and IH,
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because they illustrate the demise of the Holy Roman Empire’s influence over the
internal affairs of its princedoms and the establishment of sovereign states (Osiander,
1994). So the contribution that these peace agreements made to the development of
the state, to paraphrase Tilly, show that peace also made the state (Howard, 2001).
The post-Westphalian system of states was hence one that provided for a measure of
order in international affairs. The actors in international affairs were recognized as
states and, within this, understandings were established that reinforced relations
between them.
These agreements also led to a new kind of diplomacy (Der Derian, 1987;
Berridge, 2010). Diplomats and diplomatists became the functionaries of rela-
tions between states and sought to provide for peace as measures short of war (Cull,
2008), while also seeking to secure their national interests in relation to other
states. A burgeoning diplomatic system through the exchange of delegations had
at its core what French statesman Cardinal Richelieu called ‘négotiation continuelle’.
To ensure that diplomats were properly supported in fulfilling their role, ministries
of foreign affairs were the ‘inevitable corollary’ (Berridge, 2010: 5) of continuous
representation. This concept of permanent representation that developed from
the seventeenth century meant the leaders of these states could be kept abreast
of developments in other areas of Europe and gave prominence to diplomats as
peacemakers in subsequent history. Importantly, as diplomatic missions (the term
for those despatched to act as diplomats) were established in foreign capitals of
Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the individuals involved
found themselves in shared circumstances and the ‘diplomatic corps’ emerges on
the basis of an esprit de corps (Sharp and Wiseman, 2007). In the post-Westphalian
period this is how relations between the major European states, many still monar-
chies, have been conducted, a machinery that augured for peace. Further, the
order that the Westphalian peace provided for also allowed for European states to
establish Empire (q.v.).
The peaceful environment in which states found themselves gave birth to
what scholars of the English School of international relations would identify as
‘International Society’ (Wight, 2005; Bull, 2002; Dunne, 1998). This is the recog-
nition that states have similar interests in their self-preservation and conduct
themselves in a mutually recognizable fashion. This does not preclude conflict,
according to English School proponents, but helps to mitigate the anarchic nature
of international affairs. In looking at the history of Central Europe since the Peace
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of Westphalia, clearly there have been numerous bloody conflicts but the prospect
of decade-long wars has been removed.
Peace also provides space for economic activity, and in the first decade of the
twentieth century levels of economic interconnectivity rose to unprecedented levels
through trade centred on the industrialized nations. In an era before the term
‘globalization’ was in use, this suggested a level of interconnectedness that many
believed made war impossible. So before an era of total war (q.v.) was identified we
might talk of an era of ‘total peace’. We know that World War I began in August
1914 with brutal consequences for those in Europe and its empires. It is ironic
that it is the nation-state which carries the responsibility for being ready to fight
wars and at the same time endeavours to avoid such a scenario.
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began long before the armistice of 11 November 1918, when the guns fell silent.
Before war broke out, large sections of society in Europe and beyond opposed war
as a means of settling international disputes. Instead they looked to ‘arbitration’
and sought to build upon the precedence of the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899
and 1907, where the principle of international arbitration was promulgated.
Arbitration refers to a mode of resolving, peacefully, disputes, relying on the
protagonists agreeing to abide by the decision of an independent body. Though
the Hague Conferences failed to achieve agreement that an international court
should have universal jurisdiction over all disputes, other notable achievements
were made in the fields of voluntary arbitration, the rules of war and disarmament.
Arbitration’s critics point to a lack of enforcement powers. Instead it relies on the
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participants’ will to adhere to the decisions taken by the arbitrator. The outbreak
of World War I in August 1914 critically undermined the value of arbitration
as a mode of resolving international disputes.
Equally important in the opening years of the twentieth century were debates
about the utility of war and pacifism after the publication of Angell’s The Great
Illusion. Pacifism is a belief that war and the use of violence is an unsatisfactory
and undesirable means of settling disputes. While often associated with the
individual, ‘Pacifism would … lose its inner drive without at least an implicit
obligation to take a personal stand against war’ (Brock, 2000: 90). Pacifism is
a broad church and those who adopt its principles do so to differing degrees. At
the outset of World War I, a clear distinction emerged between an absolute or
pure pacifism (or pacifist), and pacificism (or pacificist), a less rigid interpretation
identified by Historian A. J. P. Taylor. The latter term came to mean more tradi-
tional views, which were previously termed pacifism, and included the right to
self-defence, while the stricter understanding came to mean a call for the absolute
abolition of all armed forces and military capability. Some other pacifists would
seek non-violent action or civil disobedience as a more effective means of instilling
a change in their predicament. Considered to be a highly principled or moral
approach to resolving issues, pacifism writ large has often been closely associated
with religious beliefs such as those of Hinduism and Buddhism and, within
Christianity, the Quakers or Religious Society of Friends, which grew out of the
seventeenth-century English dissenting movement to have a global presence (Hirst,
1923; Brock, 2000). Conscientious objectors, those who refuse to perform military
service, often cite pacifist beliefs in their rationale. Famous pacifists include
Mohandas Gandhi, whose campaign of non-violent opposition led to Indian inde-
pendence from British colonial rule in 1948.
But, while pacifism is itself a contested subject and while its later development
in the twentieth century emphasized non-violent action, prior to 1914 many
adherents incorporated a belief in wars of self-defence. So what Sir Rupert Smith
would call in 2005 the ‘Utility of Force’ was prevalent in many quarters of society.
This included many religious and women’s groups, trade unions across Europe
and other leftist groups, and the peace societies that had been founded in the
nineteenth century in the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany. In the
United Kingdom the National Peace Council founded in 1908 brought together
over 200 different groups from village peace societies to the national trade unions
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in a belief that an informed public would not countenance war, in peace and
justice, and concerns for what we now call human rights and environmental issues
(Vellacott, 1980; National Peace Council Archives). However, the outbreak of
war changed the views of many. In the midst of the nationalist fervour that
took hold in August 1914, many who called for peace to prevail across Europe
supported their governments in the conflict: ‘The peace journals attest to the fact
that most activists did indeed change their position in August 1914’ (Laity, 2001:
217). There were those who continued to champion peace, but from the outset the
discussion of peace became intimately related to an anti-war movement, a pattern
that would to varying degrees be repeated in subsequent conflicts.
Those who remained opposed to the war included Glasgow educator and social
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The most famous Peace Prize is the Nobel Peace Prize. It is awarded annually
by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, nominated by the Norwegian Parliament
in accordance with the will of Swedish industrialist and inventor Alfred Nobel
(Lundestad and Njolstad, 2002: 221). The terms of this award are that the winner
‘shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the
abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of
peace congresses’. The Nobel Peace Prize is one of a number of awards, given
alongside Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature
and Economics. The prizes are widely recognized as the highest form of recogni-
tion of the contribution made by an individual or organization. Notable Peace
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Perhaps the ultimate manifestation of a desire for peace during the carnage of
World War I could be found in Russia. Following the overthrow of the Russian
monarchy in February 1917, the Provisional Government’s failure to bring peace
to the conflict provided an opportunity for the Bolsheviks under Lenin to seize
power in October. They immediately sought peace negotiations with the Central
Powers (Germany, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires), which began
in December 1917. Despite the punitive terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
concluded in March 1918, by ending the conflict with the Central Powers it
did provide the Bolsheviks with the opportunity to consolidate their position and
bring a measure of peace to Russia. That it could not be considered anything more
was because an often vicious civil war ensued for the next four years between the
Bolsheviks (Reds) and opposition forces (Whites), supported by interventions from
other nations (Figes, 1997; Mawdsley, 2008).
The key point from this brief account of World War I is that there was a
diversity of opinion during the war over what it was being fought for and what
the result should be. There was considerable debate over the aims of the war and
the aims for a postwar world. This is hardly surprising given the complex history
and disputed nature of peace and was to manifest itself in the peace settlements
which resulted. It also meant for the generation that fought World War II that they
had an immediate point of reference for ensuring there was no repeat of Marshal
Foch’s prophetic remark of the 1919 settlement: ‘This is not peace. It is an armistice
for 20 years’ (Henig, 1995: 52).
The settlements that brought World War I to an end make a vital contribution
to our understanding of peace since. This is because these peace settlements
were contested and interpreted differently by those at the time and afterwards.
International history can be read in many different ways and it certainly was in
this case. For example, Foch’s remarks are often used to illustrate that the
Great War’s denouement was illiberal, whereas the marshal himself had wanted a
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settlement that was harder on Germany. Already mentioned in this chapter, and
with a vast literature covering their detail, it is important here to capture what
we might call the ‘Versailles moment’ – the expectations for peace in 1919 and
its legacy. Following the Armistice of November 1918, hope for a better world
was widespread. Those who had seen the horrors of the war firsthand, or its shatter-
ing impact on those returning to civilian life, were determined to create a peace
that would prevent such a calamity happening again. Succinctly put, ‘Never
again’ was a guiding mantra that allowed for new ideas to be put forward and
an acceptance to try new ways of doing things – for example, collective security
which will be considered presently – and even a new academic discipline in
International Relations (Macmillan, 2001; Williams, 1998 are good introductions
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Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon
the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intoler-
able sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which
terms of peace would rest, not permanently but only as upon quicksand. Only a
peace between equals can last. Only a peace the very principle of which is equality
and a common participation in a common benefit. The right state of mind, the
right feeling between nations, is as necessary for a lasting peace as is the just set-
tlement of vexed questions of territory or of racial and national allegiance.
(Woodrow Wilson, 22 January 1917, 64 Congress, 2 Session, Senate Document no.
685, ‘A League for Peace’)
In this speech Wilson articulated his views on what peace should be based upon:
a common understanding mutually arrived at. A year later, with the United States a
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participant in the war, Wilson’s annual message to Congress was notable for another
contribution to the development of thinking about peace in the twentieth century.
In this speech of 8 January 1918, he outlined Fourteen Points which sought to
explain to the American people US involvement in the conflict by providing for
the peace that would follow. The key aspects of the speech were an end to secret
diplomacy, which Wilson believed perverted the cause of peace – instead, there
would be open covenants of peace, openly arrived at; freedom of the seas at all times;
disarmament; the right to self-determination; and, perhaps most importantly, was
the fourteenth point, which called for a ‘general association of nations’ (that became
the League of Nations).
The Fourteen Points were based on the ‘Inquiry’ that Wilson had established
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under the leadership of his close advisor Colonel Edward M. House, of approxi-
mately 150 academics, journalists, lawyers and experts on foreign policy (Goldstein,
1991; Williams, 1998). Building upon the breadth of views that abounded
during the conflict on what form peace should take, the Inquiry illustrated the
opportunity for different views to be incorporated into Wilson’s thinking on peace
at this stage. The Fourteen Points began by stating that international diplomacy
should be based on ‘open covenants of peace, openly arrived at’ and went on to
claim ‘freedom of the seas’, the removal of barriers to trade and offensive armaments,
before arriving at the last point: ‘a general association of nations’ to preserve
peace. The League of Nations, as the general association became known, is readily
identified as Wilson’s legacy, though he was not alone in discussing the idea at
the time (for example, Viscount Bryce, British Ambassador to United States
1907–1913, and later twice South African Prime Minister 1919–1924, 1939–1948,
Jan Christiaan Smuts, both influenced Wilson and the eventual outcome). The
Fourteen Points collectively aimed to change the fundamental nature of interna-
tional diplomacy that had failed to prevent the war. Importantly, in agreeing to
sign the Armistice in November 1918 the Germans hoped and believed that
the peace settlement that would result would be based on the Fourteen Points. The
discussion in Paris the following year would centre on how far the promise of
the Fourteen Points would come to fruition in the face of British and French
opinion, which called for Germany to be squeezed ‘until the pips squeak’. This
reflected the disjuncture between the terms of the Armistice that was signed in
November 1918 and the hopes that the German people had been stoked by Wilson’s
own rhetoric (Goldstein, 2002; Williams, 1998).
Buoyed by a cocktail of relief and euphoria in France and Great Britain, there
was a call for Germany to accept responsibility for the war. In the United Kingdom
the General Election of 14 December 1918 – known as the ‘Khaki Election’,
given the numbers of returning servicemen – was fought amid calls to ‘Hang the
Kaiser’. At Versailles, the French premier Georges Clemenceau, known as le Tigre
(‘the tiger’), was receptive to his people’s revanchist desires (Watson, 2008). What
became known as the ‘War Guilt clause’, Article 231 in the Treaty of Versailles has
been interpreted as a clear breach of Wilson’s notion that, for peace to be lasting,
it would be between equals. By fixing responsibility for the damage done during
the war to Germany, this facilitated a belief that all of the war’s ills could be ‘blamed’
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specific terms. The issue of reparations, for example, was a particularly thorny
one, with an Inter-Allied Reparations Commission being appointed to flesh out
the final details. Importantly, also, the conference was covered voraciously by the
world’s media, providing another dimension to peacemaking for the delegates.
‘It also ensured that the peace-makers at Paris, unlike their counterparts at Vienna
a hundred years previously …, had to negotiate in the full glare of publicity,
knowing the details of their discussions would be carried the next day in newspaper
columns throughout the world’ (Henig, 1995: 3). To delve into those details is
beyond the scope of this book but it is important to say that compromises
were made on all sides. This meant most parties left Paris relatively satisfied (Sharp,
1991). However, the compromises that had been made would become contradic-
tions as the treaty was enacted in the months and years that followed in confirming
Foch’s estimation of the settlement.
Germany’s reaction to the Versailles settlement was immediately hostile (Hitler,
1924). The first democratically elected German chancellor, Philipp Scheidemann,
resigned rather than sign the treaty, having been wholly excluded from the
negotiations. A new government under Gustav Bauer did sign the treaty in June,
but was quick to refer to the treaty as a ‘Diktat’, given that its terms were dictated
by the victors. Further hostility to the peace treaty came from nationalist elements
in the military and their supporters. They accused politicians of the new Weimar
Republic (so named after the city where Germany’s first constitutional assembly
took place in late 1918) of betraying the German military, as the German homeland
had not been invaded, and so a myth that the German military had been ‘stabbed
in the back’ was born. This cleavage typified the instability politically and economi-
cally of the Weimar Republic and ultimately provided the opportunity for Adolf
Hitler to bring National Socialism to power in Germany (Hobsbawm, 1995; Patch
Jr, 1998).
Even amongst the Allied powers criticism of the Treaty was fierce. The most
famous, though subject to continuing historical revisionism, was composed by
British economist John Maynard Keynes after he returned from Paris as part of the
British Treasury delegation. Entitled The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes’
central argument was that imposing reparations on Germany above and beyond the
‘damage done’ would be a mistake: it would build resentment and, most impor-
tantly for Keynes, prevent Germany from recovering economically and contributing
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to a healthy international economy that would benefit everyone. Instead, the terms
as Keynes saw them, and as Hitler was able to portray them, were ‘Carthaginian’ in
their severity (Keynes, 1920/2011; Skidelsky, 2003; Markwell, 2006).
In the US, opposition to the Versailles Peace Treaty meant it was never even
ratified. Senators such as Republican Henry Cabot Lodge opposed the treaty, as they
feared US inclusion in the League of Nations would challenge US sovereignty.
Wilson’s conduct did not help the cause of ratification of the treaty (Link, 1979).
His explanations of the merits of the new order he was proposing fell on deaf ears,
and he refused to accept any of his opponents’ amendments. Therefore the Peace
Treaty was rejected by the United States. This meant that it was not until 25 August
1921, almost three years after the Armistice had been signed, that the United States
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signed a peace treaty with Germany confirming a Joint Senate resolution of 2 July
1921 ‘That the state of war declared to exist between the Imperial German
Government and the United States of America by the joint resolution of Congress
approved April 6, 1917, is hereby declared at an end’ (Treaties, Conventions,
International Acts, Protocols and Agreements Between the United States of America and
Other Powers 1910–1923, vol. 3. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1923:
2596).
While additional peace settlements would be concluded with the other Central
Powers (see Box 3.3 for further details) absent from discussions in France was
Russia. In the midst of a civil war that was being fostered by many of the protago-
nists in Versailles (for example, the United States sent forces into Russian territory
to fight against the Bolsheviks), and with an ideology that called for an end to
international diplomacy, this was perhaps not surprising. Nonetheless, if peace
was the outcome sought in Paris, Russia had a role to play. As it was the exclusion,
voluntary or otherwise, of Russia, this meant a number of the issues would remain
unresolved and led to a measure of collusion between Russia and Germany in the
interwar period, as the two outcasts of the international system.
One further legacy of Versailles that had implications for the future of peace
in the twentieth century is that the gathering in Paris brought individuals together
who in a generation’s time would again have to address the peace that would result
from a global conflict. Individuals such as future US President Franklin Roosevelt
and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and a host of junior officials met
in Paris (Williams, 1998).
The legacy of Versailles at the time and subsequently is contested (Beloff, 1950).
Writing in 1998 in the opening to a German Historical Institute book reassess-
ing Versailles after seventy-five years, the authors ponder: ‘Even now, the reason
for the ultimate collapse of the Versailles system remains disputed’ (Boemeke,
Feldman and Gläser, 1998: 2). The Versailles Peace Settlement – the Versailles
Moment – framed the discussion of peace during the interwar period and into
World War II. Writing in December 1939, one British Foreign Office official recalled
of Versailles, as he pondered the outcome of World War II which had begun that
September, ‘I hope that we shall be less severe and wiser in many respects than
at Versailles, but more severe and wiser in others’ (Rofe, 2007: 74). Wisdom would
be a sought after commodity for those seeking to achieve peace once World War II
had begun.
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Even before World War II broke out, the idiom of peace was employed in efforts
to avoid war. After engaging in diplomatic talks with Adolf Hitler to avert conflict
in September 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared that
he believed the Anglo-German agreement would bring ‘peace in our time’. Within
a year Chamberlain would declare Britain to be at war with Germany.
As was argued in Chapter 2 (‘War’), in one sense the peace of World War II
was that provided by the Cold War in its aftermath. However, this outcome was
not the intended peace that the protagonists envisaged in 1939. Had Germany
and Hitler’s National Socialism aim of Lebensraum (‘living space’) for the Third
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Reich and/or Japan’s imperial forces in their quest for a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity
Sphere triumphed, then a different peace would have followed the end of the
conflict. In making this statement, though, there may be a danger in conflating
the stated war aims of the protagonists with their objectives for peace in the event
of their triumph. We cannot know precisely how either of these states would
have acted. What we do know is how the Allied powers who prevailed addressed
both their war aims and their plans for peace. In light of our discussion thus far
of the delineations and intersections of issues pertaining to peace and war, it is not a
surprise that those who had seen the Versailles peace disintegrate wanted to align
war aims and peace aims to best ensure that the peace that would follow would be
long-lasting.
The endeavours of those in the United States to consider peace began before
the nation was attacked at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. At the beginning
of 1940 Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles chaired the Advisory Committee
on Problems in Foreign Relations in Washington, which aimed to ‘survey the
basic principles which should underlie a desirable world order to be evolved after
the termination of present hostilities’ (Notter, 1949: 20). The remarkable feature
of this committee was the extraordinary and fantastic issues it covered such as a
Regional Political, Economic and Security Organization for Europe, a Permanent
Court of Justice, and even an International Air Force to ensure peace. The essential
dilemma the committee faced in 1940, and one they would readdress once the
United States was part of the war, was given expression by one of the committee
members: ‘The future is so uncertain, the course of the war so problematical,
and the atmosphere in which peace negotiations may take place so unknown’
(Rofe, 2012). While the dramatic events of the summer of 1940 put a sharp focus
on what German victory might mean for the United States, it would nevertheless be
these issues that would be addressed after Pearl Harbor. It was in the weeks after this
attack that President Roosevelt commissioned the Advisory Committee on Post-
War Planning, which would provide key support for the American efforts and result
in the United Nations organization and the World Bank regime.
Before then, the United States, along with the United Kingdom and Russia
and twenty-three other nations, had signed the Declaration by United Nations on
1 January 1942. This pledged the signatories – the ‘United Nations’ – not
to pursue a separate peace with the Axis Powers and to uphold the Atlantic
Charter of August 1941. This Anglo-American agreement was a blueprint for the
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postwar world. There is a worthwhile parallel to be drawn with the eight points
of the Atlantic Charter, Wilson’s Fourteen Points and, before then, articles of
Kant’s perpetual peace given how many from the former have their antecedents
in the latter. ‘Self-determination’, ‘Freedom of Trade’, ‘Freedom of the Seas’
and ‘Disarmament’ are all common features and, where the other points differ, it
is recognition that they may be expressed and dealt with more succinctly. As such
the Atlantic Charter may be described as a statement of Allied peace aims in World
War II (Williams, 1998).
The desire to ‘learn lessons’ from the Versailles experience was clear in the
communication between the leaders of the key Allied powers (United States,
Russia, United Kingdom and nationalist China) during World War II. They met
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with each other and exchanged their closest officials during the course of the war
rather than rely on a set-piece conference at the end of the fighting. The wartime
conferences at Casablanca (January 1943 – involving Roosevelt, Churchill); Cairo
(November 1943 – Roosevelt, Churchill, Chaing Kai Shek); Teheran (November–
December 1943 – Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill); Yalta (February 1945: Roosevelt,
Stalin, Churchill) were the venues for the discussion which shaped the postwar
world. The issues that were tackled in smoke-filled rooms long into the night
between these statesmen and their advisors meant that when it came to the gather-
ing after the European war had ended in Potsdam in July 1945, key decisions
had already been made. By way of example, in the first of the meetings mentioned
above, at Casablanca, an announcement was made that had profound influence
of the outcome of the war and the peace that would follow. While the wartime
leaders put ‘winning the war’ first, appropriately, given its outcome was far from
a foregone conclusion, what that meant was given substance when Roosevelt
announced that the objective of the Allies would be unconditional surrender of
the Axis powers. The call for ‘unconditional surrender’ was and remains controver-
sial. It gave the Axis a propaganda coup at the beginning of 1943 to be able to
portray to their peoples the Allies as wanting to crush them, and undoubtedly
prolonged the conflict by stiffening resistance to Allied forces. While these were
risks associated with announcing unconditional surrender as the goal of the
Allies, Roosevelt was prompted to do so by his concern for the postwar peace.
By pledging the Allies to this goal, the president, mindful of the 1919 experience,
was seeking to remove any ambiguity that could arise from an armistice. The Allies
wanted a decisive end to the war, which they believed would give them the best
chance to establish a meaningful peace (Reynolds, 2006, 2007).
As we can see from the account above, it was the United States that provided
much of the impetus for discussion of peace, but it was not solely an American
enterprise. The British under Winston Churchill provided manpower and expert
opinion, particularly emanating from the Labour Party as part of the National
Government (Ashworth, 2007), to the efforts to address the postwar world across
a range of issues. Other countries contributed, too. Individuals such as economist
John Maynard Keynes and South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts would
make their mark on the process (Skidelsky, 2003; Mazower, 2009b: 28–65).
Also important was the army of civil servants and bureaucrats, many of whom
had experienced the failings of the previous peace, who contributed to the ‘war
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effort’ by supporting the efforts for a ‘better peace’ in the postwar world. These
were the kind of people who made up the 730 delegates attending the United
Nations Monetary and Financial Conference (1–15 July 1944), more commonly
known by its location, Bretton Woods, in New Hampshire. President Roosevelt’s
remarks to the opening gathering of delegates from the forty-four nations reflected
a belief that the economic consequences of the conflict would be determinant
of peace. Keynes was in the audience as the head of the British delegation and
heard Roosevelt say, ‘The economic health of every country is a proper matter
of concern to all its neighbors, near and far’ (Rosenman, 1950). The conference
established the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development – known
as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the General
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Agreement of Trade and Tariffs (GATT). Collectively they formed the Bretton
Woods system that governed monetary relations and provided for an economic
regime that transcended into the twenty-first century (Ikenberry, 1996).
In 1944, thought was also being given to the shape of political peace and
an organization that could effectively provide order to international relations.
While the United Nations declaration had been made at the beginning of 1942
in order for a lasting peace to result from the war, there was a desire that the
nations united to fight the Axis should be more than a wartime alliance (Plesch,
2010). The Washington Conversations on International Peace and Security
Organization, (21–29 August 1944), commonly known for the mansion in which
they were held in Washington, DC, Dumbarton Oaks, was another of the wartime
conferences that brought the major Axis powers together to discuss the peace
that would follow. Representatives of the US, UK, Soviet Union and China
agreed at this meeting on the foundation of the United Nations organization,
with the Security Council as its executive branch that would emerged the follow-
ing year in San Francisco. Representatives of fifty nations met at the United
Nations Conference on International Organization (25 April–26 June 1945).
By then President Roosevelt had died, although the address he had been work-
ing on, designed to provide impetus to the impending UN conference, clearly
illustrated his desire that the peace that would emerge would be long-lasting.
He wrote:
The work, my friends, is peace; more than an end of this war – an end to the
beginning of all wars; as we go forward toward the greatest contribution that any
generation of human beings can make in this world – the contribution of lasting
peace – I ask you to keep up your faith.
(undelivered Jefferson Day Address, New York Times, 13 April 1945)
These words again reveal the philosophy integral to those fighting a war but
looking to build a meaningful peace. That philosophy is evident also in the outcome
of the conference in San Francisco: the United Nations organization based on the
UN Charter. The opening line of the preamble reminds us again of the influence
that war has on the formulation of peace: ‘We the Peoples of the United Nations
determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in
our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.’
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The importance of the Preamble to the United Nations is that it clearly outlines
the shape of the peace that its authors wanted to achieve, while simultaneous-
ly giving credence to the notion that peace is the absolute opposition to war
in stating first of all that the United Nation’s primary aim is to ‘save succeeding
generations from the scourge of war’.
Given its relative brevity for such a defining statement of purpose, it is quoted in
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full here:
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Within the rest of the preamble one can see the influence of peace on the fifty
nations who signed the Charter in the spring of 1945. This continues into the
articles of the Charter. The first article of the first chapter outlines the UN’s
purpose as ‘to maintain international peace and security’. Though the member
states may not always have held to this, the Charter is a cornerstone to the body of
international law that has provided for the regime of international relations since
1945.
An important element of World War II thinking on peace, evident in San
Francisco and the UN Charter, centred on how a sense of justice could be instilled
in the postwar world. The sense that the last peace had been unjust pervaded
strategizing for a more just postwar world. In both of the major theatres of conflict,
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Identifying precisely the end of the Cold War is a troubling task to scholars of
history and international relations; identifying when peace began even more so,
though a number of International Relations scholars have tried. Francis Fukuyama’s
The End of History and the Last Man and Charles Krauthammer’s ‘The Unipolar
Moment’ both attempted to address the sudden and ‘surprising’ arrival of peace
after 1989, but within a matter of years their concepts were challenged by the
history that was unfolding (Fukuyama, 1992; Krauthammer, 1990/1991). Providing
a counter-view G John Ikenberry argued that ‘common wisdom’ meant ‘The end
of the Cold War … was a historical watershed’. Ikenberry disagreed, putting it
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plainly:
The common wisdom is wrong. What ended with the Cold War was bipolar-
ity, the nuclear stalemate, and decades of containment of the Soviet Union –
seemingly the most dramatic and consequential features of the postwar era.
But the world order created in the middle to late 1940s endures, more extensive
and in some respects more robust than during its Cold War years. Its basic
principles, which deal with organization and relations among the Western liberal
democracies, are alive and well.
(Ikenberry, 1996: 79)
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at the operational level) from Joint Warfare Publications entitled ‘The Military
Contribution to Peace Support Operations’ (Joint Warfare Publications, 2004).
The volume’s origins and title illustrate its heritage, but nonetheless in its pages it
is clear the thought given to the subject. For the British military the term ‘Peace
Support Operation’ encompasses a range of activities with the ‘peace’ prefix,
and others such as conflict prevention and humanitarian intervention. The trajec-
tory of this thinking within an organization dedicated to fighting and winning
wars was towards an all-encompassing methodology for the consideration of
peace. The ‘comprehensive approach’ recognizes multiple lines of activity –
diplomatic, economic and political – alongside a military one as a means of achiev-
ing strategic goals. For militaries, this may mean increasing deployments in
the wonderfully abbreviated OOTW, standing for ‘Operations Other Than War’.
To return to our original delineation of peace between a negative Hobbesian peace
and a positive peace, it is clear that peacekeeping, Peace Support Operations and
OOTW exist in the space between the two constructs. In short, modern peace is
often difficult to identify.
The peace of the twenty-first century is a chimera and as such has become
ever more entangled with war and conflict. US President George W. Bush declared
major combat operations in Iraq over on 1 May 2003, just eight weeks after
the military campaign had begun in March 2003. In making his announcement
he stood under a banner stating ‘Mission Accomplished’ on board the USS Abraham
Lincoln, having flown on to the aircraft carrier while it was returning from the
Persian Gulf. Over 4,000 US servicemen died as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom
and 30,000 have been wounded in action (WIA). Only 139 were killed during
‘combat operations’, with 545 casualties during that phase. The vast majority of
deaths and casualties have come in the ‘post-combat operations’ phase, i.e. since
President Bush made his announcement. (Figures for US casualties can be found
at http://www.defense.gov/news/casualty.pdf.) Figures for Iraqi casualties are less
well accounted, though cross-referencing a number of sources would suggest that
between March 2003 and December 2009, more than 100,000 casualties have
been caused by ‘violent deaths’. Bush later admitted to Time magazine as his
administration drew to a close that ‘Clearly, putting “Mission Accomplished” on an
aircraft carrier was a mistake’ (‘Seeking a Legacy’, Time, Mark Thompson, Washington,
12 January 2009; http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1871060,00.
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This is the fifth anniversary of the day that President Bush arrived on an
aircraft carrier in a flight suit and declared ‘mission accomplished.’ And in
an ironic way, I think it can be said, when you look at the historic way that
we use our military, that the Iraq war was over five years ago, in classical terms.
And what began was a very contentious occupation that placed our military
in what classically we would call a holding position, totally dependent on the
ability of the political process to reach the type of solution that would allow this
occupation to end.
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CONCLUSION
‘All we are saying is give peace a chance’ (repeat and fade)
(John Lennon, 1969)
Composed during his ‘bed-in’ at the Queen Elizabeth II hotel in Montreal in 1969,
John Lennon’s anthemic comment on the ongoing war in Vietnam is a clear indict-
ment of war as a means of resolving conflict. Lennon’s words capture the view
of many with a liberal bent who consider peace to be attainable if enough people
want it. Equally, Lennon’s words are utopian in the view of realist thinkers, as
peace cannot simply be wished into existence. Yet the sentiment the words offer
does exist in the real world of international relations: the preamble to the UN
Charter – a foundation to our international regime – pledges states ‘to unite our
strength to maintain international peace and security’. Nonetheless, perhaps its
most pertinent implication for our understanding of peace is that the final word
is one that is unspoken: ‘fade’. In the minds of many people, peace does indeed
fade from prominence without its ‘other’, war.
While Lennon’s words would seem to place peace as proffering hope, a
directly opposite view was taken by American strategist Edvard Luttwak at the
end of the 1990s. Luttwak stated, ‘An unpleasant truth often overlooked is
that although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political
conflicts and lead to peace’ (Luttwak, 1991). He argued in ‘Give War a Chance’
that, when wars end naturally, a peace of substance is the result. Further, he
viewed intervention in a conflict as unlikely to help provide a resolution; instead,
it had the capacity to make things worse. Published as it was at the end of a
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summer in which swift NATO intervention had seemingly righted the wrongs
being done in Kosovo, and after the protracted conflict in the former Yugoslavia,
Luttwak’s comments were and remain controversial. Whatever your take on Luttwak,
what is clear, again, is the interrelationship between peace and war that has been
presented here.
Throughout this chapter particular thought has been given to the use of language
in describing war and peace. Combined with the form of expression, in English
at least, the language of war and peace is often unhelpful. We use words to distin-
guish between different things when there may be little distinction, and instead
considerable overlap. There is a propensity, seen particularly in the contemporary
media, to represent things in ‘black and white’ and we often understand things
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FURTHER READING
Carr, Edward Hallett (1939/1947) The Twenty Years’ Crisis: An Introduction to
International Relations. London: Macmillan.
Doyle, Michael (1997) Ways of War and Peace. New York: W. W. Norton.
Morgenthau, Hans (1948 and many subsequent editions) Politics among Nations:
The Struggle for Power and Peace. New York: McGraw Hill.
Sharp, Paul (2009) Diplomatic Theory of International Relations. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
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WEBSITES
http://www.cfr.org/
Council on Foreign Relations: US-based thinktank focused on issues in contem-
porary international relations.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/
The journal of the Council on Foreign Relations.
http://www.internationalrelations.com/
Website regularly updated by Professor Joshua S. Goldstein, Professor Emeritus
of International Relations, American University (Washington, DC) and Research
Scholar, Department of Political Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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http://www.e-ir.info/
e-International Relations (e-IR) is an online resource for students of International
Relations, containing useful forums and feeds generated by students for students.
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CHAPTER 4
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Sovereignty
The state is the central actor in both political science and political history. As
Richard Evans argues, history as a university subject … was traditionally ‘emphati-
cally the political history of the nation-state and its relations with other nation-
states. The history of high politics and international diplomacy was king’ (Evans,
1997a: 161). Knowledge of sovereignty, as both a political attribute and a legal
status of the state, is not only vital to a thorough understanding of state behavior in
IR, but key to appreciating the driving force of much European and international
history. The problem is that sovereignty itself encapsulates both political and legal
facets. While much can be said (as evidenced by the Introduction) for using interna-
tional history to obtain a deeper appreciation of international relations, law itself
presents a very different perspective of the international system. As Charles De
Visscher argued in the 1950s, international law is not an easy fit in explaining the
imperatives of IR:
There is no branch of law that lends itself less easily than international law to
this reduction to a system of the mere imperatives of abstract logic. The dangers
of schematic conceptualism are never more apparent than when it is applied
to relations where particular situations are far more important than general
situations and where, consequently, general norms are still far from occupying
the place that belongs to them in the internal order.
(De Visscher, 1957: 66)
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There is a particular need for historical accuracy when dealing with sovereignty;
the concept undergoes a series of fundamental shifts in various incarnations,
which can only be appreciated by looking back to the system of states developing
in sixteenth-century Europe, and specifically to key contributions to political and
legal thought. The bulk of this chapter examines watersheds in European political
thought and practice that have shaped sovereignty; the second section explores the
tensions between IR and customary international law in defining contemporary
sovereignty; the third section concludes with a review of the internal oppositions
that increasingly characterize sovereignty in law and complicate its ambiguous role
in IR.
HISTORICAL WATERSHEDS
While the use of historical enquiry effectively ‘bookends’ any investigation with
neat beginnings and endings, sovereignty is as much a reflection of core social
principles regarding the development of humans as both individuals and groups as
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it is a feature of any historical era or civilization. Thus, while not all tribes or groups
possess a sovereign, or a given structure of law, they do have an identifiable sense
of the internal and external facets of their group. This in itself is enough of an
organizing principle by which to produce internal cohesion and desire predictability
and preservation in relations with others. What transforms rudimentary social
groupings into political units is when the seat of power becomes coterminous with
a given territory and an identifiable population according to observable precepts
of law. Ancient Greece is by no means the first example of such a transfer but it
is one of the best examples in which this transfer was first recorded and analysed.
What emerges from the analysis is a clear vision of sovereignty associated not
with the authority of a particular ruler, but with authority derived from, and enacted
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according to, the body of law. In other words, ‘in Greek political theory the sover-
eignty of the law was a fundamental and perennial concept’, in which Greek or
Homeric kings were ‘officer[s] of the community’ not rulers seeing sovereignty
vested in their own person (Larson and Jenks, 1965: 21).
Plato produced the first identifiably Greek concept of the sovereignty of law:
‘I see that the state in which the law is above the rulers, and the rulers are the inferi-
ors of the law, has salvation’ (Plato, 2010: 4.715). Aristotle, Plato’s student, helps
to answer our two overarching questions (In whom does authority ultimately
rest? What are identifiably ‘sovereign’ characteristics?). The supreme power of the
state rests in the citizenry (Aristotle, 1995: 3.i), which may be found in one, or a few,
or many. (For an excellent appraisal of moral ideas, behaviour and political concepts
in classical context, see Herman, 2006.)
The identifiable characteristic is not the power emanating from this aggregate,
but its sufficiency, a ‘union of them sufficient for the purposes of life’ (Aristotle,
1995: 7.4–7.8), wanting for nothing. This populace operates before the sover-
eignty of the law, and according to Aristotle, the truest relationship between people,
their government and the law ‘is secured by making the law sovereign and the
government its servant’ (Barker, 1906: 328). There is clearly some discomfort in
the idea of giving full authority to a governing body that can use a body of law
indiscriminately and abusively; for this reason, law must – in the eyes of Greek
jurists – remain on a higher plane of authority than the government.
The Roman era provides the first real split as to where sovereignty resides,
and accordingly produces two schools of thought. The first school is inherited
from the preceding Greek era, and adheres to the idea of sovereignty vested in
the law. Cicero, for example, argues that ‘there exists a supreme and permanent
law, to which all human order, if it is to have any truth or validity, must conform’,
with ‘no other foundation of political authority than the consent of the whole
people’ (in Carlyle and Carlyle, 1950: 16–17). The people, or populus – themselves
sovereign before the law – are therefore the source of true political authority.
However, this runs counter to the absolutist school of sovereignty propounded
by the Roman emperors themselves. This school has two key precepts: first, that
the emperor himself, and not the law, is sovereign; second, that what the ruler
(prince or emperor) desires has the strength of law (quod principi placuit legis habet
vigorem; Stein et al., 1983: i. 2.6). This is a serious division. Are the people
themselves still the sovereign body? Or is the emperor’s will law? The Roman jurist
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Ulpian suggests that in practice emperors rule, but only because their power is
bestowed upon them by the people. In other words, while the emperor’s wishes have
the strength of law, ‘this is only because the people choose to have it so’ (Carlyle
and Carlyle, 1950: 56). As will be seen, this division over what sovereignty entails
(power, authority, the law) and where it resides (the ruler or the populus) character-
izes both the political practices and the commentary of the medieval period. Before
understanding the theory of sovereignty of the state, as argued by Jean Bodin in
1576, we need to appreciate the two sides of this first division.
The populus school is dominated by the view that ‘Medieval political thought
inherited, and indeed was based upon, the concept of the ruler “as being bound
by the laws of the nation, not as superior to them” ’ (Larson and Jenks, 1965: 22,
citing Carlyle and Carlyle, 1950: 230). Here, we find the works of canonists like
Augustine and Aquinas, who follow Aristotle’s tradition of regarding authority
not bound up in the wishes of the ruler but flowing from ‘the habit of life of the
community and that the law is supreme over every member of the community,
including the king’ (Larson and Jenks, 1965: 22). To this we can add insights
from the jurist Gratian, that ‘law is not an arbitrary command imposed by a
superior, but rather represents the adaptation of the permanent and immutable
principles of “nature” and justice to the needs of a community, under the terms
of the circumstances and traditions of that community’ (Gratian, in Carlyle
and carlyle, 1950: 97). Another key view emerges from English jurist Bracton, and
from John of Salisbury. Bracton, a lawyer himself, provides a clear view of medieval
hierarchy in stating that ‘where there is no law, there is no king, and the king is
under God and the law, for it is the law which makes the king’ (quoted in Larson
and Jenks, 1965: 23).
As examined below, the medieval period is dominated by a three-way power
struggle between the rise of the Church’s authority directed by the pope, the rise of
individual political units across Europe led by monarchs, and the rise of the Holy
Roman Empire, led by an emperor. Who had authority over whom? The populus
school rejects the idea of sovereignty as an absolute form of authority. As Carlyle
argues, the only sovereignty recognized during this era ‘was that of the law, and even
that was subject to the law of God or nature’ (Carlyle and Carlyle, 1950: 370).
Whilst the Church may attempt to enforce its sovereignty over both spiritual and
secular elements, and whilst early states may attempt to rebuff this power, there was
not a clash between two systems of law; the only supreme authority was the law
itself, not the State/emperor, not the Church/pope, or even Holy Roman Empire/
emperor. Other jurists and theologians subscribing to this view include Gerson,
Nicholas de Cusa and Fortescue.
Medieval political theory turned into practice when key monarchs started
modelling their states on this view. England, chiefly under Henry II, and Spain’s
Alfonso X are two notable examples of rulers who subscribed to the supremacy of
law. These kings did not subscribe to the view of absolutism in which they as rulers
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literally embodied the law; they did, however, have a large – though not absolute
and arbitrary – control over their territory and people.
During the early Middle Ages, the Church emerged as the key power over both
spiritual matters regarding the faith of all and, initially, over secular matters,
regarding the role of political powers on earth and their place under God. From
this perspective, all of mankind formed a natural and unifying hierarchy. With the
rise of the Holy Roman Empire, that hierarchy was separated between the pope’s
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authority over the universal Christian Church, and the emperor’s authority over the
secular Holy Roman Empire, which comprised most of Western and Eastern Europe.
Together, the result was a great Christian unity under God, known as the Respublica
Christiana, or Christendom.
Where did sovereignty rest in the system of Christendom? Under God,
Christendom itself was separate (but inseparable) between the religious authority of
the Church on earth (sacerdotium) and the political authority of the Holy Roman
Emperor (regnum), which emerged in the early medieval period and which – over a
thousand years – shifted its secular seat from Rome to Constantinople to Vienna.
Underneath the sacerdotium and the regnum was a range of lower authorities – both
secular and sacred – from city-states to nobles, from monarchs to bishops. All, how-
ever, were regarded as members of the Christian community; none could declare
independence from this community, for to do so would have been to flout God’s law
(Jackson, 2001: 157). What was confusing was the element of separation between
the religious and ‘worldly’ authority on, and over earth, that the pope claimed, other
forms of secular authority claimed by the Holy Roman Emperor, and still lesser
forms of authority claimed by all beneath the emperor.
By the 1200s, however, increasing conflict arose over who held authority, the
type of authority, and the area – or jurisdiction – in which that authority
was wielded. The prime division was between the Church and a growing array
of monarchs and secular rulers, as well as divisions between secular leaders
themselves. This initially produced a neat hierarchy in which ‘secular rulers might
concede that on religious matters the pope “ruled”, but in the secular realm the
emperor increasingly challenged them’; this subsequently implied that ‘kings had an
exclusive right to rule’ in their own realm, which undermined the universal author-
ity claimed by popes (Holsti, 2004: 119). Gradually, an increasing number of mon-
archs refused to acknowledge the authority of the Church in secular matters. Such
challenges to the pope, to the Church and, indeed, to the overall structure of
Respublica Christiana emerged from Henry VII and King Robert of Naples. The
Church responded by threatening to exclude the secular rulers from the religious
authority that flowed through Respublica Christiana by excommunicating them,
or by labelling such attempts as heretical – a trespass against the natural order
and against God. These threats were increasingly ineffective and, by 1302, French
kings publicly proclaimed that they alone were ‘emperor in their own domain’ (qui
est imperator in regno suo) (Ullmann, 1949).
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Robert of Naples used this precept to defy a series of imperial edicts, and to
reject the power of both the pope and the imperial laws of the Holy Roman Empire,
arguing that monarchs not only ruled in their domain, but had the right to make
laws within it, including laws that ran counter to imperial laws. Monarchs had
the right, or the authority, to do this (though not necessarily the actual power to
make it happen). In other words, they had the sovereign authority to do so, by virtue
of the fact that they personally were sovereigns, and that they held authority
over their domain. In this way, Robert of Naples took on the emperor, and in 1312
was found guilty of high treason (crimen laesae majestatis) (Holsti, 2004: 119).
Robert – ironically – had much in common with the Pope Clement IV, in wanting
to limit the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor in key areas. Indeed it was
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Clement IV who supported Robert in the papal bull Pastoralis Cura, by arguing
that the emperor had no imperial authority over any other monarch, and that
(unsurprisingly) the pope himself had superiority over the emperor. As Holsti argues,
the Pastoralis Cura ‘effectively put an end to imperial claims of dominus mundi
and thus to the idea of an organic, single Christian polity’ (2004: 119; also see
Ullmann, 1949).
From Clement IV’s perspective, sovereignty was not only vested in the individ-
ual ruler, but vested in a ruler within a specific geographical area – the two
together forming a polity. As will be seen, geography, and its internal/external
dynamics, is a key facet of contemporary sovereignty (and identity, see Chapter 7).
Clement IV also highlighted the universal vs particularist features of medieval
Europe. The universalizing authority claimed of the emperor, and eventually the
pope, gave way to the particularist authority actually wielded by key European mon-
archs in specific regions. Polities were different from each other, but also similar in
that the majority of their rulers saw themselves as the unquestioned, absolute repos-
itory of sovereignty in their territory. Embodying the absolutist perspective, rulers,
not the ruled, and not the abstract polity, and not the law, were sovereign. There are
hard and soft interpretations of absolutism. Some European rulers (Peter the Great,
Louis XIV, Louis XV) took absolutism to extremes in claiming not only supreme
power over their realm, but arguing that this power was God-given and therefore
undeniable, irresistible. Others felt it resided in them absolutely, in the sense that it
simply did not rest in the law, or the people, or the overall polity.
The authority, and eventually the power, of the pope and the emperor were
increasingly eroded as monarchs claimed sovereignty within their own realms.
Francis I of France and Henry VIII of England successfully challenged papal author-
ity by effectively nationalizing the Catholic Church in their own states. Francis took
the authority granted to him by the Concordat of Bologna in 1516 and used it to
appoint clergy and own church lands; Henry went further in 1533 by divorcing
Catherine of Aragon in defiance of the pope, taking over (and destroying) church
lands and property, and forcibly transforming English Catholic structures into a
Church of England. Jurists like Vitoria and Suarez highlighted the increasing politi-
cal particularism of late medieval Europe by commenting on the self-contained
nature of specific polities, and the sovereign authority of their respective rulers.
The death knell for papal authority was sounded by Vitoria, who argued that
princes – like the pope himself – derive their right to rule from God; this not only
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renders princes as ‘vicars of the Church’ in their own realm (undermining the
local need for the pope as a universal figure), but places princes, and not the
Church, in full control of their sovereign realm (eliminating the right of
the Church to intervene in civil authority) (Holsti 2004: 121). Martin Luther,
as the embodiment of the Protestant Reformation, took Vitoria’s views to their
logical conclusion, asserting that monarchs were sovereign in matters secular,
and in matters religious, effectively granting them the freedom to declare indepen-
dence from the Catholic Church in political and religious issues. This additional
layer of authority to the form of sovereignty claimed by European secular rulers
was encapsulated in 1555 at the Peace of Augsburg, which granted princes the
right to freedom over the religion of their own subjects (cuius regio, eius religio).
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The first cracks in the formerly unshakeable edifice of the Church had appeared.
Its ability to exercise political or economic authority over princes and polities
was increasingly reined in. As J. N. Figgis argued a century ago, ‘By the destruction
of the independence of the Church and its hold on an extra-territorial public
opinion, the last obstacle to unity within the State was removed’ (1913: 72).
Figgis continues, arguing that ‘The unity and universality and essential rightness of
the sovereign territorial State, and the denial of every extra-territorial or indepen-
dent communal form of life, are Luther’s lasting contribution to politics’ (Figgis,
1913: 91).
STATE SOVEREIGNTY
The concept of the respublica survived the medieval period, and transformed into
the secular concept of a political unit, or polity. The polity that emerged in
early modern Europe was a single, unified collectivity that possessed an identifiable
population, was confined by borders to a specific geographical area, developed
an identifiable set of political interests, ruled by a single authority. Monarchs held
this authority in the medieval period on the basis of the early modern European
definition of sovereignty (from which most subsequent definitions derive); that
is, supreme authority within a given territory. The quality that defined early modern
states, rather than individual rulers (including popes, emperors, kings, bishops, aris-
tocracy), is sovereignty. As will be seen, contemporary ‘vessels’ of sovereignty include
the populace in its entirety through the vehicle of a constitution, a given political
party, and individual leaders (democratic, autocratic, military and religious).
In 1576, with the writings of the eminent French legal theorist Jean Bodin,
Europe encountered for the first time a methodical treatment of the theory of state
sovereignty. This in some sense brings together both the populus and absolutist
schools, because, while these states are dominated by rulers with unfettered power
over their own realm, the state itself is a wider representation – or emanation – of
the prince, and is the vehicle for his authority, and embodiment of its sovereignty.
In other words, the state, as an extension of the ruler and the ruled, is itself sover-
eign. Sovereignty itself ‘is something more than mere superiority; it is at once
the greatest force and the supreme authority within defined territorial limits’. That
sovereignty emanates from the state rather than flowing solely from an individual
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illustrates one of the key generic aspects of sovereignty, namely its permanence
as an attribute of the state, rather than just a quality of an individual ruler. From
the political perspective, this consolidates the state as the key governing unit,
granting states a measure of permanence and, consequently, a permanent attribute
by which governments can justify the use of key policies, including security
and warfare, necessary to secure the state itself. From the legal perspective,
Bodin argues that sovereignty ‘cannot be perfect unless it is absolute and indivisible
… free of any subordination without and of any division within’ (De Visscher,
1957: 16).
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As F. H. Hinsley observed:
At a time when it had become imperative that the conflict between rulers
and ruled should be terminated, [Bodin] realized … that the conflict would be
solved only if it was possible both to establish the existence of a necessarily
unrestricted ruling power and to distinguish this power from an absolutism that
was free to disregard all laws and regulations. He did this by founding both the
legality of this power and the wisdom of observing the limitations which hedged
its proper use upon the nature of the body politic as a political society compris-
ing both ruler and ruled – and his statement of sovereignty was the necessary,
only possible, result.
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politic and the supreme authority vested in that body within a given territory.
Whether the body politic was a democracy, monarchy or aristocracy, it was sovereign
simply because it was subject neither to any external human law nor authority within
its territory.
Niccolò Machiavelli observed both the spectacular cultural outpourings of the
Renaissance and the vicious inter-city state and familial violence that repeatedly
sundered Italy. The pinnacle of the absolutist school, The Prince was deemed to
be supreme within the territory of the state, but with a heavy responsibility for
its survival and wellbeing. As such, only a strong and effective administrative order,
and its ruthless application was the correct and indeed only means by which to
ensure the successful expansion of a state. The obligation of all rulers was raison
d’état, that all actions must be taken in the interests of the state, and only the
state (including disagreeable actions). Sovereignty was simply the justification
for both such means and ends. Hobbes, reacting to the violence of the English Civil
War, argued that men war against each other without mercy to the extent that
authority must be taken from them, and moved from the remit of God’s law to the
permanent service of the state, where it could be exercised in unrestricted fashion.
The Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius represents a break from these views. He argued
that sovereignty is more than the specific power, influence and authority of a
leader; it is a legal status held by each state. This widens the jurisdiction and the role
of sovereignty from a specific claim to authority made by individual monarchs, to
generic legal attribute common to all states, regardless of their ruler. Further, the
power entailed in a state being able to act as a self-contained unit internally, as a
result of being defensible externally, also acted as a measure of sovereignty: ‘that
power is called sovereign whose actions are not subject to the legal control of another’
(Suganami, 1996: 230, in Holsti, 2004: 121).
The secular power gained by German princes in 1555 at Augsburg to promote their
own faith within their own territory did not guarantee peace; indeed it promoted
bitter conflict and intense competition between a host of warring Catholic and
Protestant powers. The first half of the seventeenth century thus saw protracted
violence ravage Europe as sacred–secular and secular–secular antagonisms were
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fought during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). This era was especially bloody,
ravaging the land, cities, towns, people and governments of High Medieval Europe
in a manner not seen since the Roman conquests. The violence represented both the
last gasps of the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor (and their allies) to stamp
their authority on European polities, and the first serious attempts by rising polities
to consolidate their territory, extend their power and entrench their authority.
The peace negotiations concluded between 1644 and 1648 produced three
significant treaties: one concluded at Osnabrück and two at Münster, known
collectively as the Peace of Westphalia (now northwest Germany). The concept
of sovereignty emerges not as a specific reference in these two treaties, but as a
method of consolidating and conceptualizing the hundreds of claims which had
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arisen during and long before the Thirty Years’ War by various authorities to par-
ticular lands, provinces, cities, towns, enclaves, castles, etc. As with most negotia-
tions, there is both a desire to restore the status quo for those who enjoyed success
under the previous regime, and a wish to create anew in order to avoid a repetition
of the violence itself. Thus the Peace of Westphalia succeeded paradoxically in restor-
ing a number of the ancient holdings of the Holy Roman Empire and long-standing
dynasties while simultaneously establishing the freedom of princes old and new to
govern on the basis of sovereignty, rather than on the basis of fealty owed to the pope
or the emperor.
With the permanent marginalization of both the Holy Roman Empire and the
Church, the first outcome of Westphalia was the emergence of the sovereign state as
the singular mode of European constitutional authority. Not only did polities
like Switzerland and the Netherlands gain uncontested sovereignty, but intra-state
diplomacy and extra-European alliances formed all attested to the emergence of
a genuine system of sovereign states. Pope Innocent X memorably condemned the
Westphalian treaties as ‘null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate,
inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time’. This symbolized the second major
outcome of Westphalia, namely, the ending of intervention on religious issues or
pretexts (generally the most common form of curtailing sovereign claims). While
Westphalia did not prevent future wars, it did (with the exception of Ireland and
the Balkans) largely stamp out religious wars in West European wars sparked by
religion.
Westphalia had two further effects. It consecrated Bodin’s principle of sovereignty
as vested in the state rather than in the body of the ruler, and it heralded the
equal application of sovereignty to all states. The legal equality of sovereignty is
based on the understanding that a monarch who claims sovereign status in being
able to promote, protect and secure their state must necessarily recognize the
rights of other monarchs to claim the same. As sovereignty is vested in the state,
and not actually within the ruler, this rendered all state units legally alike, despite
material and constitutional differences. In sum, modern sovereignty had emerged,
but with an uneasy blend of the absolutist leftovers and populus content. As Kreijen
argues,
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units – that brought about the decline of traditional medieval society. This essen-
tially factual transformation of the political scene had a direct influence on the
excessive legal claims to universal power formulated by the two protagonists of
the weakening Empire [the pope and the emperor]. It was the de facto situation
that elevated the theory of sovereignty from its early youth to the full-grown
legal doctrine that could sustain a new international order of de jure equal and
sovereign States.
(Kreijen, 2004: 32)
Deconstructing Westphalia
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Following the example set by Osiander (1994), Krasner (1999), Philpott (2001),
Kegley and Raymond (2002) and Holsti (2004), there is much merit in looking
afresh at the treaties of the Westphalian peace, to get a clear picture of the key prin-
ciples that still dominate the organizing principle of modern Europe. Five key points
emerge:
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monarch, the early modern version of the populus school regarded sovereignty as
a social contract struck between the populace, who agreed to be ruled fairly, and
a fair ruler. The social contract suggests that individual members of society agree
to be ruled; society transfers the authority to rule to one or a number of people.
Whether they do so implicitly or explicitly, and whether this transfer is subject
to qualifications or even revocation, is a subjective interpretation.
The medieval era accepted without question the concept of such an accord as
the proper basis of the state; indeed this axiom is found again and again in the
work of Thomas Aquinas (On the Governance of Rulers), Marsilius of Padua and
Suarez, among others. As found in Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes’ interpretation is
as dispassionate as it is logical; the agreement between society and ruler is simply
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one in which absolute power is transferred irrevocably to the monarch, who then
assumes (and possibly subsumes) the status of a sovereign, and the attributes of
sovereignty. The jurist Pufendorf suggests, similarly, that this transfer of power
entails first a pactum unionis, which is then followed by a pactum subjectionis.
However, it is Jean-Jacques Rousseau who emerged as the chief exponent of
this form of plebiscite sovereignty: sovereignty as the public expression of will of a
whole community, and the rightness of that general will (Bowle, 1961: 319–336).
The precise terms of Rousseau’s pacte social are as follows: ‘Chacun de nous met en
commun sa personne et toute sa puissance sous la supreme direction de la volonte
generale; et nous regevons encore chaque membre comme partie indivisible de
tout’ (‘Each of us puts in common his person and all his power under the
supreme direction of the general will, and we still each member are an indivisible
part of all’; Rousseau, 1964: I. c. 6). Thus, for Rousseau (as for Hobbes), ‘the social
contract was the title deed of sovereignty’ (Larson and Jenks, 1965: 26). In other
words, mankind’s acceptance of a social contract between ruled and rulers legiti-
mized the state as a unit, and justified its practices.
From the political perspective, the steady acceptance of sovereignty defined as
the general will of the community cannot be overstated. From the 1700s onwards,
attempts to oppose it almost always ended in war, whilst attempts to support
and institutionalize it produced an increasingly clear structure – and eventually
society – of European states. This doctrine both crystallized and catalysed the
French Revolution, and the American Revolution. Taine exhorted the newly enfran-
chised French populace to believe that they themselves were not only kings, but
greater than kings. Thomas Paine argued similarly, ‘In republics such as there
are established in America the sovereign power, or the power over which there is no
control and which controls all others, remains where nature placed it – in the people’
(Paine, 2010: i, 6).
With Hegel’s metaphysical theory, ‘the concept of the State as a harmony of
the whole society is the absolute power on earth, and the denial of the existence
of law in international affairs’ (Bowle, 1961: 36–50). This suggests not only a
forcible gathering of legal authority and material power into the state units of early
modern Europe, but a parallel denial of any existing authority outside the state.
Hegel’s views can be a little misleading. He is clear that ‘the institutions of political
society are an expression of, and are maintained by, the general will’ (2.409), but
is unsure whether the general will is itself ‘properly sovereign’. This suggests that
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From this perspective, the state unit becomes increasingly regarded as a vehicle
by which to translate sovereignty as the general will of the people on the inside,
into a particularist set of laws, customs and culture, defensible in the form of
sovereignty as power from those on the outside. However, one must not make the
mistake of assuming a clear and categorical difference between states operating on
the basis of the social contract, and states governed by more absolutist monarchs.
The eighteenth century witnessed a tremendous variety of types of state, styles
of governance and conceptualizations of sovereignty which existed concurrently but
in radical contradistinction. What can be argued is that, from Westphalia until the
defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, one finds an increasing connection between sover-
eignty as a series of legal and political concepts and sovereignty as state-based practice.
As Holsti opines:
There was not only a connection between concepts and practice, in other words,
but a growing unity in how these connections were made, justified and actioned.
This unity is based on the norm of legal equality. Simply put, equality is the
natural outcome of states that considered themselves externally autonomous
from others by virtue of sovereignty. A major complicating factor of the Peace of
Westphalia was the sheer number of polities that claimed not only sovereignty for
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themselves, but also legal equality vis-à-vis others. As Kegley and Raymond note,
the patchwork quilt of Westphalian Europe included hundreds of sovereign polities,
343 of which lay in Germany, which in turn included 158 secular polities, 123
religious principalities and 62 imperial cities (Kegley and Raymond, 2001: 116).
By the time of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 (used to settle the War of the Spanish
Succession), legal equality between all states, including the Holy Roman Empire,
was the external attribute of the internal property of sovereignty.
Westphalia, Utrecht and Vienna do not represent sharp changes in state practice;
rather, they represent three occasions when the rules regarding state claims to
internal authority and external autonomy were consecutively consolidated. By 1815,
a large number of the ‘Westphalian polities’ had been absorbed into larger areas,
and the Church itself had radically waned in its proto-sovereign claims over key
areas. From the hundreds claiming sovereign status in 1848, the Congress of Vienna
reduced to a mere thirty-nine the number of states regarded as legitimately sover-
eign. From the use of legal equality as the norm denoting the equal status of sover-
eign states came another norm, came recognition as the principal method by which
a state was first recognized as sovereign by another. Thus polities could come into
existence, but ‘would not enjoy the rights of sovereignty until recognized by other
powers, meaning primarily the great powers of the day’ (Holsti, 2004: 128–129).
Together, legal equality and recognition transformed the political map of Europe
from a multi-actor assemblage of different types of polities all with different statuses,
to one with fewer (usually larger) state units. The result was the consolidation
of sovereignty as both the pre-eminent legal status of European states and the
paramount political attribute of their statehood.
Moving into and beyond the nineteenth century, two major forces need to be
borne in mind.
First, the dynamics of colonialism. As a separate method of governing non-Western
groups of people, nineteenth-century international law necessarily incorporated
a variety of ‘special doctrines and norms … devised for the purpose of defining,
identifying, and categorizing the uncivilized’ to be able to codify practices of
‘“conquest” and “cession by treaty” among the modes of acquiring territory’ (Anghie,
1999: 4). The colonial encounter is of critical importance to both the extent of
non-sovereign jurisdictions afforded to European powers and the changes imposed
upon key assumptions of sovereignty as an organizing principle of governance.
The most notable scholar in this area is C. H. Alexandrowicz, whose extensive
and pioneering body of work includes An Introduction to the History of the Law of
Nations in the East Indies (1967) and The European–African Confrontation: A Study
in Treaty Making (1973).
Thus while the colonial confrontation is key to appreciating the character
of sovereignty and the nature of international law, a sensible framework by which to
understand non-European forms of self-government, and imposed governance,
needs to examine the process by which order is created among entities belonging to
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tices of instituting colonial control over territories and peoples, and in the process
of transforming them into European possessions, identifying how sovereignty in
turn was reconstituted and reshaped through colonialism.
Second, the rise of international organizations as additional non-state entities.
Although states as sovereign political units moved around each other in increasingly
sophisticated ways, there was insufficient diplomatic contact between states and
national representatives, and even less recognition of the external consequences aris-
ing from increasing state interdependence, and as such ‘no perceived need for insti-
tutionalized mechanisms to manage international relations’ (Thompson and Snidal,
2000: 693). Thus, it was not until the nineteenth century that international organi-
zations began to appear in significant numbers. Notable examples include the
Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), which in the form of its pseudo-multilateral
‘Congress system’ represents a new development in the composition and conduct of
international relations. The Congress system instituted two innovations; first, a sys-
tematized approach to managing issues of war and peace in the international system;
and second, the requirement of state representatives to meet at regular intervals to
examine diplomatic issues. Despite four major peacetime conferences held between
1815 and 1822, the Congress system was overtaken by more informal structures,
limited only to tackling problems and crises as they arose, not a systematized attempt
to anticipate or prevent diplomatic problems. As such, the Congress system was
replaced by the ‘Concert of Europe’, featuring only sporadic groupings, generally
prompted by the outbreak of wars rather than the deliberation of diplomacy or sov-
ereignty. These include Paris (1856), Vienna (1864), Prague (1866), Frankfurt
(1871), Berlin (1878, 1884–1885) and The Hague in 1899 and 1907. Congress and
Concert outputs were focused both on the topos of sovereignty and newly arising
cross-border dynamics. Thus, as argued by Thompson and Snidal:
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1919–1945
After World War I, another watershed opportunity presented itself in the form of
two key concepts: self-determination, to buttress the content of sovereignty; and a
change in the criteria of sovereign recognition, which altered the form of sovereignty.
The 1919 Treaty of Paris, famoulsy associated with self-determination, along with
Woodrow Wilson’s famous statement that ‘Sovereignty resides in the community’
(quoted in Reves, 1945). However, self-determination as a political norm had imme-
diate implications for the legal norm of recognizing states as sovereign. Sovereignty
was no longer simply defined as internal control over a given territory, and auton-
omy from and legal equivalence with other states. Instead, government itself became
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a criterion for recognition. States had to possess a democratic constitution that could
guarantee both political freedom and protection for the rights of minorities. New
criteria of democracy, constitutionalism and minority rights present three possible con-
straints on the formerly untrammelled status of sovereignty (Philpott, 2001: 37–38).
Sovereignty came under additional constraints after World War II, when recognition
norms were extended to all former colonies with no criteria whatsoever. Regardless
of their internal capacity for governance or ability to maintain external autonomy, a
cohort of newly sovereign states emerged to join the international state system.
CONTEMPORARY SOVEREIGNTY
For IR scholars and students, sovereignty is the key attribute of statehood;
the common possession of this attribute renders all individual states functionally
non-differentiated in terms of their status and motivations. Sovereignty consolidates
the state unit internally, though IR has generally less to say about this, apart from
the issue of whether borders are hard or soft. Externally, sovereignty deters states
from countenancing any higher external authority, and this renders the interna-
tional structure precarious, with insecurity rather than cooperation as the behav-
ioural constant. IR treats sovereignty altogether too lightly; there is an easy
ambiguity at work in all mainstream theories that have historically damped method-
ical investigations of the principle itself, and its specific application to the structure,
states and emergent international organizations. One reason for this may be that few
in IR are aware (or indeed interested) in the detailed political history that refined
sovereign concepts and practices. Fewer still take the time to appreciate
the various components of sovereignty that exist within customary international
law, or to understand how these definitions lay a burden of oppositional tensions on
analyzing the definition, status and practice of sovereignty.
We ourselves need to be reasonably clear as to what contemporary sovereignty
itself entails regarding state units. A number of eminent legal theorists have pro-
duced seminal works on this issue, of whom Ian Brownlie is particularly instructive.
Brownlie makes the following three points.
• First, from the perspective of the international system, ‘sovereignty and equality
of states represent the basic constitutional doctrine of the law of nations, which
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1998: 289).
In terms of competence (the authority and capacity to enact a given policy), sover-
eignty describes ‘the legal competence which states have in general, to refer to a
particular function of this competence, or to provide a rationale for a particular
aspect of the competence’ (Brownlie, 1998: 291). From this basis, sovereignty refers
to two things: jurisdiction over national territory, and the actual ‘power to acquire
title to territory and rights accruing from the exercise of power’.
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Simply put, internal sovereignty concerns the interior aspect of the state, and refers
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to the supreme power of the state to formulate laws in respect of its jurisdiction
and population. External sovereignty concerns the exterior aspect of the state
regarding its freedom to act with regard to other States, and the identical freedom
held by all other states, which produces the principle of sovereign equality. If no
state recognizes a superior, then all are in this sense equal.
Two points can be made here. First, internal sovereignty occurred in theory
and practice before external sovereignty. As witnessed by the above historical survey,
the declining Respublica Christiana compelled individual rulers to assert their own
authority upon their own realms; those who were successful in doing so became ‘the
holders of the monopolies on economy and force’ (Kreijen, 2004: 30). As demon-
strated by Robert of Naples and others, like Philip the Fair of France, local rulers
fiercely resisted imperial domination in their own jurisdiction. For both kings,
this took the form of papal attempts to tax the local clergy, and various popes
retreated on this issue, confirming the precept of the ‘king being emperor in his
own kingdom’ (rex in regno suo est imperator in regni sui). The necessary but subse-
quent corollary of this is the requirement of rulers to likewise not recognize external
superiors (principes superiores non recognentes). This precept was first used to separate
states whose rulers had already declared themselves imperator in regni sui from
the Holy Roman Empire, but which increasingly came to denote their general
autonomy from each other in the emerging international system. The source
of exclusive authority within a given domestic jurisdiction – i.e. one which will
not recognize any superior authority – logically implies an independent position
outside that jurisdiction. As Kreijen argues, ‘Historically, therefore, external sover-
eignty or independence rests on internal sovereignty – the latter being a condition
sine qua non for the former’ (2004: 32). Second, contemporary sovereignty assumes
both internal and external aspects to be simultaneously present and mutually con-
stitutive for true sovereignty to inhere; this combination alone denotes the attribute
of statehood.
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Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World, the two can be
defined accordingly:
Non-intervention and sovereignty in this meaning are basically two sides of the
same coin. This is the central principle of the classical law of nations: the sphere
of exclusive legal jurisdiction of states or international laissez faire … It is a formal
legal entitlement and therefore something which international society is capable
of conferring. Negative sovereignty is the legal foundation upon which a society
of independent and formally equal states fundamentally rests.
(Jackson, 1990: 29)
Sovereignty has two faces. One looks outward, towards the outside world, being
concerned with foreign relations … it define[s] a free nation as ‘not being subject
to another nation’s power’. But in addition to this negative side there is yet
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another, a positive face, a face which looks inwards, and refers to a nation’s power
to regulate its own affairs; call it autonomy if you like. These aspects are what is
currently known as external and internal sovereignty.
(Van Kleffens, 1953, in Kreijen, 2004: 106)
conquests’ on the basis of raison d’état; relative sovereignty explains that rulers
are constrained by the numerous agreements and treaties (considered binding),
and the various obligations and norms that flowed from them (Holsti, 2004: 122).
The quality of absoluteness does not refer to the quantitative extent of sovereignty,
but rather to the scope/jurisdiction of issues and powers over which authorities
are sovereign. This point is frequently missed in IR; absolute qualities do not
touch on whether sovereignty is supreme within the state or constrained via equality
outside it, but rather the qualitative scope of a state’s ability to maintain or alter its
authority and capacity for power. What, therefore, can be seen to impinge on the
latitude of a state’s authority? From the perspective of international law, virtually
nothing. However, the perspective of international relations, whose conception
of sovereignty is generally more ambiguous, more readily supports the idea that
the political power inherent in state sovereignty (rather than its legal authority)
can be visibly truncated by all manner of processes, and has been since the end
of World War II. Globalization, the rise of international organizations, the increase
of international obligations, the frequency of humanitarian-based interventions in
the jurisdiction of states and the progressive institutionalization of EU integration
all impinge on the political, economic, military and social freedom of action enjoyed
by various state authorities in a way that suggests that they are still sovereign.
However, as all states are subject to the same attenuating forces, they are sovereign
only in the same, truncated, conditional, limited sense that everyone else is. The
question of sovereignty’s conditionality must be carefully treated as either an issue of
law, or an issue of politics. In international law, the mainstream view is of sover-
eignty as an indivisible principle; in IR, however, sovereignty is increasingly treated
as one of a number of facets of statehood, subject to internal constraints and external
challenges. A brief examination of EU integration makes this clear.
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which has legislative initiative, and the ECJ, which has interpretive and enforce-
ment powers to ensure national laws operate in conformity with European
Community law. The standard argument is that, taking supranational policy-
making, and the powers of the European Commission and ECJ together, the EU
effectively ‘pools’ the sovereignty of its member states in key areas, constraining
their freedom of action and permanently circumscribing core aspects of their
sovereignty.
The ‘hard’ legal position is grounded in the principle that becoming a party to
a treaty in no way undermines or limits the sovereignty of a state. Rather it
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does the opposite: it manifests and highlights the very authority of a state due
to its sovereignty to enter into agreements with other sovereigns (as first estab-
lished in the Peace of Westphalia). It follows, therefore, that the EU – as a series
of interlocking institutions embedded in a treaty structure – cannot undermine
the sovereignty of its member states. Sovereignty by definition is inalienable
and indivisible. What EU integration entails is the pooling of certain powers and
authorities in key policy areas originally enjoyed by member states as a manifesta-
tion of their individual sovereignty. Member states – by virtue of being sovereign
– transfer these powers and authorities to the EU. As long as the state retains its
legal personality within the international legal order, it retains its sovereignty
regardless of what it subsequently transfers regarding authority and power. The
mere fact that member states can at any time withdraw from the treaty and all
accompanying obligations, and reclaim these same powers and authorities
bestowed on the EU, proves that sovereignty has not been compromised.
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the principle of sovereign equality are satisfied. In their practice the European
Communities, while permitting integration which radically affects domestic
jurisdiction for special purposes, have been careful not to jar the delicate treaty
structures by a too ready assumption of implied powers.
(Brownlie, 1998: 292)
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and steeped in the organizing structures and expectations of sovereignty, as with the
EU’s gradual enlargement policy to the changed political landscape of the Balkans.
Equally, however, a cocktail of IGOs and NGOs are detailed (usually by states) to
solve cross-border policy issues from famine to war to global warming.
What, therefore, are the lessons to be learned for historians and IR theorists
alike when examining sovereignty? First, as outlined in Box 4.4, getting to grips
with the multiple definitions of and within sovereignty will reduce the chances
of error, misuse and conflation.
Legal sovereign: the person or persons who administer the government accord-
ing to the law of the land.
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This collective sovereignty can denote either the actual or potential power of a
national society in its entirety.
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CHAPTER 5
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Empire
To them I set no limits in space or time. I have given them dominion without end.
(Virgil, The Aeneid, 1.227f, quoted by Moorhead, 2001: 1)
… like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes; He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men;
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise – Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
(John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, 1816)
[Nation states] are not the only, or necessarily the highest, principles of political
life. Empires at their best stood for multiracialism and religious tolerance. They also
allowed a great deal of devolution in practice.
(Robert Skidelsky, quoted in A. N. Wilson, After the Victorians, 2006: 41)
INTRODUCTION
This chapter deals with a type of agency of huge interest to students of IR, that
of the category of ‘empire’, one that is often used in an ahistoric, and certainly
casual, way. Those who do not like empires use it as a epithet of disapproval,
an insult even, as in ‘imperialist’, akin to that other epithet of dismissal, ‘fascist’.
Others are determinedly nostalgic for a period when imperial ‘order’ seemed to
reduce anarchy to a necessary minimum. There is a need to be more precise about
what different schools of historical thought mean by the term and what is encom-
passed by it in different contexts, theoretical and historical, and these two needs are
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at the core of the thinking that underlies this chapter. Inevitably some topics will be
given undue weight in the eyes of some, and not enough in the eyes of others.
We have tried to pick out some of the most written about by the generality of histo-
rians and students of IR, while also looking at a few (such as the Mongol Empire)
that are not much examined. Again, the overall concern is to be suggestive and not
comprehensive.
The structure of the chapter is as follows. First we will examine how the notion
of empire has been explored in the IR literature to see the kinds of themes and
questions that this has generated. Second, we will look at the body of literature that
we think might be useful as a starting point in any further reader’s investigation
of particular imperial destinies, from the Greek Empire through to the American
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Empire. This will be done from different angles, depending on the empire in
question, as some have generated a different kind of literature derived from their
different contexts, whether premodern, modern or postmodern. Last, we will look
at what broad lessons we can draw from such a study of empire and how it might be
useful in future scholarship for a student of IR.
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places where the history of empire is being rewritten are in the areas of gender, race,
anthropology, even ecology – the so-called ‘new imperial history’ (Howe, 2010).
The links between theories of race and empire have been extended in some cases to
a consideration of how imperialism, capitalism and the dominance of particular
kinds of (especially) liberal thought are (maybe) beginning to enter both the
historical and IR mainstreams to make us consider the existence of ‘multiple moder-
nities’ (McCarthy, 2009).
Obvious constraints on the successful writing up of these imperial themes
are linguistic, cultural, and due to the gender or other perspective of the writer
and observer. All we can do here is to note these problems. They have always been
with us – who could now understand the mind of Genghis Khan or even (fully)
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Lord Alfred Milner, the great British imperialist? The dangers of reading the past
as if it were the present has never been greater as the ‘West’ undergoes one of its
frequent paroxysms of self-doubt.
As with all major terms, that of ‘empire’ is fraught with terminological difficulty
and such terms define any debate. From the Latin (and therefore Roman) period
English has adopted the root word imperium, used by magistrates to imply ‘power’.
But this relatively neutral term has also come to have major connotations of
dominance and extreme negativity. The best definitions are the simple ones, so here
we will copy one broad and one more narrow definition: those of Dominic Lieven,
that ‘empire is, first and foremost, a very great power that has left its mark on the
international relations of an era’ (Lieven, 2000: xiv), and Michael Doyle, that
‘Empires are relationships of political control imposed by some political societies
over the effective sovereignty of other political societies’ (Doyle, 1986: 19). The
danger is, of course, that we might end up calling everything an ‘empire’. As Anthony
Pagden has put it, ‘defining it so widely as to include any kind of extensive interna-
tional power runs the risk of rendering the concept indeterminate’ (in Howe, 2010:
438). Should we therefore call China an ‘empire’? On Pagden’s or Doyle’s definitions
we would not; on Lieven’s we would. On balance we agree with the first two and
have decided not to deal with China (though Lieven makes a convincing contrary
case, we fully admit), but to give the Mongols some space. We have also included the
United States, as the use of the word ‘empire’ is often juxtaposed with that state,
rightly or wrongly.
There has always been a flourishing literature on empire within history circles,
though it was for many years unfashionable – as Stephen Howe puts it, ‘For decades,
imperial history was seen as fusty, hidebound, backward-looking … Study empires
as such … most often meant studying (and identifying or sympathizing with)
imperialists’ (Howe, 2010: 1). For some of these reasons it is also a relatively
new interest in IR. But other reasons exist. Most of IR from World War II until
the 1990s was concerned with states and non-state actors like international organi-
zations (q.v.) and non-governmental organizations (q.v.). What William Olson and
A. J. R. Groom have aptly called ‘IR – then and now’ (Olson and Groom, 1991)
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made for a clear distinction between the pre- and post-World War II obsessions.
Why was this?
One reason is that, pre-1939, the empire(s) looked permanent, whereas after
1945 they looked all too vulnerable. Also, classical scholars of the Greeks and
Romans made a huge impact on IR before World War II, when IR was a far
from hegemonic subject and students were still expected to have read the classics. It
is true that Alfred Zimmern’s The Study of International Relations (1931) was one
early IR text that says relatively little about empire. But both he and Gilbert Murray,
who can together be seen as the most important of the British liberal thinkers of
the interwar period, and who defined the early (and mostly misnamed) ‘idealist’
phase of IR, had backgrounds in the classics. They were good liberals, not merely
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because they were influenced by the great liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century
like John Stuart Mill and T. H. Green, but also because they saw liberalism as
‘a Roman idea, derived from the Greek’ (Murray, quoted in Morefield, 2005: 77).
They saw the Greeks and their empire of the mind, in particular, as the model
of a ‘good’ society. Their heritage for Zimmern was to give a way to look at society
and politics as a whole – ‘It is only by the swing of the pendulum back to the
medieval idea of Order, by putting the life of the community in front of the good
life of private individuals and groups, that a way can be found out of our perplexi-
ties’ (Zimmern, quoted in Morefield, 2005: 90). Many of the liberals of that
period, and indeed for a century before, would have seen that ideal writ large in
the ‘civilizing’ mission of the British Empire and the creation of a ‘Greater Britain’
(Bell, 2007). This view, expressed by Zimmern during the Great Depression of the
1930s, has an eerie ring in our new era of economic crash.
Other classicists have also had short shrift – in the past, at least – from scholars
of IR of the Cold War period, perhaps analogous to how radical intellectuals of
the early 1900s rejected the scholarship of the Victorians, the Bloomsbury Group
being a good example. The historian equivalents of that group, like Arnold Toynbee,
a contemporary of Murray and Zimmern, was a great student of comparative
empire and also a major figure in pre-1945 British IR. His Study of History (1974)
contains a huge amount of food for thought on IR obsessions such as the nature
of order and justice and their relationship to the state. But he has tended to be
dismissed as a crank, or even a charlatan, since the 1950s (Thompson, 1985).
A reaction to this has now set in among some newer theorists (Long and Wilson,
1995; Bleiker, 2001; Becque, 2009) as a familiar part of the continual rewriting
of the historical and IR canon. Hence one of the reasons for the neglect of empire
(in the classical sense) by post-1945 IR scholars may be seen in part as a side effect
of the rejection of liberal ‘idealism’ in general, a tendency much encouraged by
Edward Hallett Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis (Carr, 1939), which made ‘ten refer-
ences to Toynbee, all of them critical’ (Becque, 2009: 9).
In addition, the study of culture (Greek, Roman or any other) per se in IR
was also seen as slightly bizarre before 1990, though there were exceptions to
this philistine rule (Bozeman, 1960). The renewed interest in empire in IR since
1990 may be put down to a number of factors, of which the main ones are related
to a renewed interest in philosophical factors narrowly defined or ‘normative’
factors more broadly in the study of IR (Brown, 1992; Brown, Nardin and
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Rengger, 2002) and in culture (Lebow, 2006, 2008). To discuss ‘tragedy’ or ‘honor’
in the context of war (q.v.) is to evoke the ideals of the Roman and Greek
empires in current debates. So these approaches are not new, but rather a return
to older considerations of morality, even meaning, in IR; considerations rather
eclipsed in the overwhelming concerns of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear
annihilation.
Ironically, these concerns were dominant during what was in effect a period
of great inter-imperial (US–Soviet) rivalry, though neither would have liked to see
their own ‘empire’ described as such, but rather as a term of abuse for the other.
Hence President Ronald Reagan’s reference to the ‘Evil Empire’ when talking
about the USSR was routine and the epithet ‘imperialist’ routinely used to denounce
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the United States from Moscow. There were some notable exceptions to the neglect
of empire as a concrete concept in IR, largely in the late 1980s, when the USSR
looked increasingly shaky, with maybe the best examples being Michael Doyle’s
Empires (1986) and Lewis Feuer’s (1989) Imperialism and the Anti-Imperialist Mind.
However, Feuer confidently predicted in the year the Berlin Wall fell, if the ‘American
ethic and its power’ were to fail, ‘that controlling role will in all likelihood fall
into the hands of the Soviet Union’ (Feuer, 1989: 1). As John Lewis Gaddis pointed
out, no school of IR theory predicted the end of the Soviet Union – his advice was:
‘if you are a student, switch from political science to history’ (Conquest, 1989,
quoted by Gaddis, 1992/1993: 53).
Since the mid-1990s there has been a huge outpouring of new and often
radical analyses of the underlying logic of IR and this has led IR back to empire as a
justificatory (or condemnatory) explanation of the problems the world now faces.
Obvious elements in this concern a support for or opposition to colonialism
(q.v.) and its practices (see page 137); the study of culture and IR mentioned
above; and the advantages of imperial groupings of states as an encouragement or
discouragement of warlike behaviour. Possibly the best example of this tendency
is found in the writings of Paul Kennedy, a historian who ‘crossed over’ into the
political sphere with his Rise and Fall of Great Powers (Kennedy, 1988), a book
widely believed to have influenced the US Presidential election of 1988. It tapped
into a relatively forgotten imperial literature of ‘decline and fall’ that had until
the late 1980s been largely the purview of historians of Greece, Rome and many
other empires, but not one that could be seen as applying to the Superpowers,
who by 1990 or so were seen as a permanent part of the woodwork of IR. The
fall of the Soviet Empire (q.v.) was able to propel historical thinkers like Kennedy
into the IR mainstream, with his detailed consideration of how military power is
dependent on economic as well as strategic actors, where the Chinese Ming Empire,
as well as those of Britain (q.v.) and Czarist Russia (q.v.) could be shown to have a
contemporary relevance.
Interestingly, as we will discuss further below, that new interest in empire
post-1990 in IR has been mirrored by a new awareness of it in History faculties.
But before getting to that new turn we need to look at a fundamental problem
that antecedes empire in both series of discourses. That problem is that of
‘power’.
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Lieven makes the claim that, while scholars of IR have tended to be interested
in ‘power, often defining it in very narrow economic and military terms’, political
scientists have tended to be obsessed with ‘problems of nationalism’ (Lieven, 2000:
25). Some would, of course, claim that the only good scholars of IR are political
scientists; we would obviously beg to differ. But given the importance to IR scholars
of all kinds of the notion of ‘power’, we might ask how that has come to relate to
that of ‘empire’. Many references in IR are made to ‘Roman’ types of empire, in
the sense of their being based on military power, territorial dominance and legal
force, or ‘Greek’, in the sense of a dominance (or hegemony) of ideas. IR scholars
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(like Ikenberry, 2006; Lundestad, 1996, 1998a; Williams, 1998), some historians
of IR (Robert Kagan is a prominent example), and politicians (Winston Churchill
and Harold Macmillan, for example), can all be said to have used this distinction.
We are never allowed to forget that in any imperial relationship force and persuasion
are (potentially) equally used tools – it is hard to imagine the United States allow-
ing France or Italy to go communist in the 1950s while also wooing them assidu-
ously with Hollywood, Marshall Aid and lashings of good cheer. This might be
seen as a ‘liberal’ or even ‘conservative’ view of how power and empire interrelate.
These thinkers do not see any Manichean desire to dominate or repress; just how
the liberal world order might be made to better function (Ikenberry, 2001, for
example).
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have made many important contributions
to this IR debate. First is their idea that ‘empire’ and ‘world order’ are, and always
have been, essentially synonymous ideas and realities, now tied together by the
cement of economic globalization, and that the current world order is based on
‘Euro-American’ ideas and practices, not mere military coercion (Hardt and Negri,
2000: xiii–xiv). Second, they contend that there was no clear passing of the torch
of Empire from Europe to the USA, or even from Britain to the USA, the process
was and is much more symbiotic and ongoing. Third, Hardt and Negri believe
that American hegemony has not come about by some sort of conscious global
conspiracy, and that the USA, powerful and dominant as it is, is not some sort of
all-powerful spider at the centre of a web of its own making and that ‘indeed no
nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project’. They also assert
that this ‘Empire’ will be, and indeed is being, slowly but surely contested by the
very ‘creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire [and are] also capable of
autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization
of global flows and exchanges’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: xv). The idea being expressed
here is that all empires rise and they can fall (Duroselle, 1981).
Other writers, like Steven Lukes, see all change in the relative status of empires,
states and other bodies as being to do with the exercise of power. For Lukes, power
is multidimensional. He says three initial positions could be taken. First, power
could be merely a question of forcing ‘A’ to do ‘B’, so that, as Lukes says, we could
merely examine decision-making processes to find the locus for power in action
(Lukes, 2005: 19). Second, it could be about a more subtle combination of
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Lukes further argues that since we cannot escape we also cannot give our
consent to it (2005: 109). But this also implies that we are all locked together in an
immensely powerful Empire of the Mind, and that (along with Hardt and Negri’s
notion of political Empire) has clear political and strategic consequences. The
really important ‘Empire’ is thus that of ideas and practices, not of the mere exercise
of physical power itself. As any parent, soldier, teacher or politician should know,
when thinking about what power means we have to understand that, as the
great Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci knew, power is based on ‘consent … a
psychological state, involving some kind of acceptance – not necessarily explicit – of
the socio-political order or of certain vital aspects of that order’ (Femia, quoted by
Lukes, 2005: 8).
But more radical scholars reach back to an older anti-imperial discourse of the
old Left, the 1930s Frankfurt School, as well as further still to Hobson, Marx and
Lenin’s denunciations of empire (Hobson, 1902/2005; Molnar, 1975; Lenin,
1916/2000) as inevitably leading to war. Following on from this, and in common
with other disciplines with which IR shares both roots and concerns, like postcolo-
nial studies, probably the most important other current obsession where empires are
evoked in IR is that of empires creating the problems of the ‘other’.
This can take a number of forms. The most obvious is in the way that hegemonic
powers and their idea structures and discourses create ‘others’ (variously described,
but usually some form of inferior ‘native’). The idea derives from Karl Marx’s
model of ‘superstructure’ (the hegemonic ideas and practices of a given ruling class)
and the infrastructure (the productive material ‘Base’), what he called his ‘critique
of political economy’ (McLellan, 1976; Marx, 1999/1867). This was developed by
the interest of both postcolonial literature and by some scholars of IR in such polit-
ical figures and scholars as Gramsci (as mentioned above). In literary terms the con-
centration has been on resistance to empire, either of the political and military or
cultural and psychological kind, with such witty titles as ‘the Empire writes back’
(Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1989). Frantz Fanon’s works on Africa first brought
such thinking into the fringes of IR in the 1960s and 1970s, and especially into
development studies.
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about how discourses of empire have marked the experience of empire for rulers
and ruled, and it replaces the study of culture squarely back at the centre of the study
of IR in general. Samir Amin, another writer in the same tradition denounced
Eurocentrism for its grip on IR and beyond (Amin, 1992). As Seth puts it, there
are also some much ‘“thicker” histories that have mapped out the historically
mutually reinforcing effects of “East” on “West” and vice versa’ (Seth, 2009: 229).
Some even claim, not without reason, that the ‘East’ in effect created the ‘West’,
an idea that has still to find traction in mainstream IR (Hobson, 2004; Bernal,
1987). In addition, the theoretical writings of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988);
Kapoor (2004); and Howe (2010: 14) to acknowledge the ‘subaltern voice’ that is
repressed in much Western literature on imperialism, and Homi Bhabha (1994),
have had an evident impact on poststructuralist scholars that will probably have a
profound effect on the way we think about IR in the future, though this develop-
ment has been accused of introducing some nigh-on-incomprehensible theorizing
into the discipline.
ATHENS
The oldest quoted imperial discussion in IR is the ‘Melian’ dialogue between Melos
and Athens discussed in Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War
(Thucydides, 431 bce/1954; Münkler, 2007). In that war, power and force were the
prime movers of the relationship. The Greek ‘empire’ centred on Athens started as a
combination of many Aegean city-states, the ‘Delian League’, in their collective
efforts to counter the growing menace of an expanding Persian Empire. Not all of
the key actors in this League were willing tributaries of Athens, and some played a
major role in the wars against Persia, such as Sparta at Thermopylae, where about
1,700 men fought off many more thousands for days in 480 bce (Herodotus, 440
bce/1996; Kitto, 1992). This battle has been depicted many times as showing how
a small group of dedicated patriots can defend their lands against an imperial giant,
and recently figured as a Hollywood blockbuster (300, directed by Zack Snyder,
2007). But the Athenian Empire was based on a ‘Thalassocracy’, a seaborne entity
to which Athens always provided the main naval contingents and expected recipro-
cal respect, which the Melians found to their cost. The decisive defeat of the Persians
was arguably the sea battle of Salamis in 480, the same year as Thermopylae.
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Later, Alexander the Great (356–323 bce) conquered the Persian Empire and
in effect created a pan-Hellenistic world that eventually helped nurture the rise
of Rome, even though that then led to the formation of other leagues, like the
Achaean League, to counter Macedonian domination. As Herfried Münkler puts
it, ‘hegemonia [became] arche: supremacy turned into domination’. This in turn
created enemies for Athens, but it was two and a half centuries before the disunity
of the Greeks led to their subjugation by the much more organized and ruthless
Romans (Münkler, 2007: 7). We might also emphasize, as does Thucydides, that
the Athenian ‘empire’ started out as a ‘league’, so what began as informal coopera-
tion in a common cause evolved into ‘hegemony’, which then turned to revolt
against that hegemony. Maybe this is an iron law of imperial creation and destruc-
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tion? As Doyle says; ‘Empire requires both a metropole and a periphery’ (Doyle,
1986: 81).
Nonetheless the Roman defeat of the Achaean League at the battle of Corinth
(146 bce) did not finish the influence of an empire that had existed since about
1100 bce. Its heroes – Alexander the Great, in particular – made a lasting impact on
the whole Middle East and beyond; many would argue its civilization has never been
bettered in artistic or philosophical terms. Greek remained a key Mediterranean
language until the twentieth century, and ancient Greece gave lasting institutions to
the West and beyond, including democracy and the Olympic Games (Doyle, 1986:
chapter 3; Pomeroy, 1999). The Greeks started a process of creating a Mediterranean
culture, and even a ‘Common Market’ that was continued by the Phoenicians,
Carthaginians and, ultimately, the Romans, with considerable contributions from
other groupings like the Jews, with Jerusalem a dominant city until sacked by the
Romans in 70 ce (Goodman, 2007).
Ancient Greece also left a legacy of history being written by the Victors, and
many, but by no means all, of the main philosophers (such as Plato and Aristotle)
and historians (such as Herodotus and Thucydides) that we still celebrate were
Athenians or lived there for some of their careers, such as the last two historians –
from Helicarnassus (now Bodrum, in Turkey) and Alimos in Greece, respectively.
Greek culture remained dominant in Asia Minor until the fall of Byzantium (q.v.)
and was still significant during the whole of the Ottoman period until the wars
between modern Greece and Turkey, when the Greek influence was literally annihi-
lated in the massacres and population exchanges of 1922–1924, before and after the
Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 (Morgenthau, 2003; Freeman, 1996). Greece since
1923 has experienced a tortuous and often violent relationship with modern-day
Turkey that continues to poison the two nations’ relationships with each other and
other states, arguably continuing to echo the problems of empire (Ottoman and
British) in the eastern Mediterranean (Woodhouse, 1999; Mazower, 2008;
Koliopoulos and Veremis, 2002).
ROME
The Roman Empire can claim with some justification to be the archetype for all
empires. It had longevity (700 bce–400 ce, and until 1453 if we include the ‘Eastern’
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cessful ones, like Mussolini’s Italy of the interwar period. On the Eritrean/Ethiopian
border, the remains of the bridge can be found, on which can still be seen the care-
fully excised shadow of the fasces (bunched rods and axe – in ancient Rome, the
symbol of the magistrates) of Fascist Italy that had ruled the area until 1940.
Those who have written about ancient Rome – Edward Gibbon (1776/1981),
Theodor Mommsen (1996, 2008) – or about the many historians of Rome (Feldherr,
2009) – are a roll call of modern classical writers, and no one can call themselves
‘educated’ without some exposure to these thinkers. Rome has definitely made its
mark on the contemporary media era. Robert Graves’ I Claudius (and a memorable
performance by Derek Jacobi in a BBC drama series in the 1970s) deserves honour-
able mention alongside Lindsey Davis’ series of books on the Roman detective
Falco and Robert Harris’s novels on the first century ce. Some of the best Hollywood
films (Ben Hur, 1959; Gladiator, 2000) have Roman themes.
As for the Romans themselves, a brief survey of even the genius of the first
century ce gives us reason to remember them. Pliny the Elder wrote a massive
‘Natural History’. His nephew Pliny the Younger left us much of interest on the
domestic arrangements of the Roman people and is fascinating for his insights
into Roman mythology. Seneca left a legacy of philosophical stoicism and political
commentary that can still be read with much profit today, especially given the simi-
larities between many of the century’s emperors (of whom he fell foul) and many
recent sanguinary dictators. To this list can be added the chronicler of the Aeneid,
Virgil, as well as historians (Tacitus), poets (Ovid) and satirists (Petronius and
Juvenal). This rich cultural harvest was acted out against the actions of the most
illustrious emperors of Rome, such as Augustus, and some of the worst, like Nero
and Caligula. Western civilization itself can be said to derive many of its key cultural
tropes from Rome.
The strength of an empire, we were reminded by Edward Gibbon, in the year of
the birth of the American Republic in 1776, is not to be measured solely in terms of
military might. The Roman Empire in the second century ce ‘comprehended the
fairest part of the earth and the most civilized portion of mankind’ (Gibbon,
1776/1981: 27). This is more than reminiscent of what we call the ‘West’. Military
might was and is nonetheless important, especially if exercised without bravado:
The terror of the Roman arms added weight and dignity to the moderation of
the emperors. They preserved peace by a constant preparation for war; and while
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justice regulated their conduct, they announced to the nations on their confines
that they were as little disposed to endure as to offer an injury.
(Gibbon, 1776/1981: 35)
But what Gibbon also points to in his remarks on ‘moderation’ is a pointer to all
empires’ propensity to succeed or fail. As Hardt and Negri put it, ‘[a]s Thucydides,
Livy and Tacitus all teach us (along with Machiavelli …) Empire is formed not
on the basis of force itself but on the basis of the capacity to present force and being
in the service of right and peace’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 15).
The Romans saw themselves as the antithesis of ‘barbarians’ and the exporters
of ‘civilization’ (Münkler, 2007: 98). Mommsen put great emphasis on the liberat-
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ing aspects of the Roman Empire, especially under Julius Caesar and Augustus. One
typical passage goes thus:
Seldom has the government of the world been conducted for so long a term in
an orderly sequence … The carrying out of the Latin-Greek civilising process
in the form of perfecting the constitution of the urban community and the
gradual bringing of the barbarians or at any rate alien elements into this circle,
were tasks, which, from their very nature, required centuries of steady activity
and calm self-development.
(Mommsen, 1968: 4)
Mommsen was sure that the expansion of the Roman Empire was inevitable.
‘Barbarians’ were attacking its border and, as Julius Caesar, not yet an aspiring
emperor, felt, ‘this state of things could not be allowed to continue’, or was ‘required
by the general political situation’ (Momssen, 1968: 23). The Romans duly destroyed
one ‘brave and desperate tribe’ after another (often ‘a toilsome subjugation’) and one
after the other Gauls, Dalmatians, Macedonians, Moesians, Helvetii, Germanii and
so on fell under Rome’s control (Mommsen, 1968: 7–44). Only when there was a
major setback, as when General Varus ‘lost’ Emperor Augustus’s legions in 9 ce was
there any real effective resistance to this onslaught of highly skilled, well-equipped
and ‘modern’ troops against barbarian levies. It was also clear that when the barbar-
ians had a chance they proved their utter brutality. Those of Varus’s men who sur-
vived the debacle in Germany were ‘fastened to the cross, or buried alive, or bled
under the sacrificial knife of the German priests’ (Mommsen, 1968: 49).
Such horror stories will, no doubt, have whipped up popular Roman disgust with
the enemy and justified repression in the name of civilization, a recurring theme
when barbarians ‘have’ to be punished.
One of the most significant results of empire has been the parallel emergence of the
phenomenon of globalization, about which, as Anthony Hopkins acidly observes,
‘no previous period in recorded history has been so persuaded of the irrelevance of
the past experience of the human race’ (Hopkins, 2002: foreword).
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This analogy of globalization has been taken up recently by Harold James, who
argues that
‘the Roman dilemma’ – the paradoxical notion that while global society depends
on a system of rules for building peace and prosperity, [is a] system [that] inevi-
tably leads to domestic clashes, international rivalry, and even wars. As it did in
ancient Rome a rule-based world order eventually subverts and destroys itself,
creating the need for imperial action. The result is a continuous fluctuation
between pacification and the breakdown of domestic order.
(James, 2006: cover notes)
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Decline
Perhaps, therefore, naturally empire also always holds the seeds of its own dissolu-
tion? The decline of Rome has been endlessly (and maybe futilely) debated, with
arguments ranging from lead in the water supply, the replacement of martial reli-
gions (like the worship of Mithras) with the softness of Christianity, through to the
madness of certain emperors and imperial overreach (Gibbon, 1776/1981). Many
recent writers have taken up Gibbon’s cudgels in trying to explain its collapse, often
pointing to themes such as civil war and internal decadence that are unfortunate
leitmotivs for many parts of our own current world (Ward-Perkins, 2005;
Goldsworthy, 2009). It has also been the subject of choice for a number of painters
– Thomas Couture’s Les Romains de la décadence (1847) in the Musée d’Orsay in
Paris is one striking example – and shown in many ‘sandal’ films, like Gladiator
(2000). It was long believed that the end of the Empire was short and bloody, with
Rome being sacked in 410 by the Goths, and then the Lombards fighting a long war
against the Byzantine remnants of the Empire in the East (q.v.). This then allegedly
led to the ‘Dark Ages’, a kind of black hole that separates the Greeks and Romans
from the Middle Ages where most people lived a kind of Monty Python and the Holy
Grail (1979) existence.
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This view is now more nuanced to one of the ‘barbarians’ certainly usurping
Italy as the centre of Roman power and culture, but also keeping many Roman
practices and norms alive, not least of which was the Latin language as the vehicle
of civilized discourse (Brown, 1971; Cameron, 1993; Heather, 2005). There have
been challenges to this view, notably from Bryan Ward-Perkins (2005), based on
archaeological evidence of extreme violence and cultural extinction. But maybe the
key point for the student of IR to note is that, as Joseph Vogt pointed out, historians
like Gibbon have tended to use the awful tale of the end of Rome to accentuate
our own allegedly superior grasp on power (Vogt, 1993: 3; see below for more on
this point).
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Byzantium
The Roman Empire in the East, that of Byzantium, has been much studied by
historians, but is only usually referred to in IR as a term of abuse – ‘byzantine’
being meant to indicate excessive, complex and ultimately self-defeating bureau-
cracy. It was often used to denigrate the Soviet Union and other Communist states
during the Cold War, though Russians themselves have never been particularly
concerned to receive the epithet. They rightly see Byzantium as one of the high
spots of Western civilization. Judith Herrin’s book Byzantium: The Surprising Life
of a Medieval Empire (Herrin, 2007) is one good summary of its achievements.
These may be said to include its sheer longevity (the original Roman Empire was
divided into two spheres by Emperor Diocletian, 284–305 ce, and only defeated by
Islamic forces in 1453); its guarding of, and building on, ancient Greek and Roman
civilization, including Roman legal and military traditions that are still important
today and, says Herrin most significantly, by ‘protecting the Christian West in the
early Middle Ages’ (Herrin, 2007: xviii).
The sacking of Constantinople in 1204, by Christian ‘crusaders’, was ironically
its major setback, and Byzantium never recovered its previous power and status,
one that was immensely enhanced by the Ottoman Empire that replaced it.
Constantinople, now known as Istanbul, is a symbol of how ‘East’ can meet ‘West’
and create wonderful synergies, as well as conflicts. As will be discussed in Chapter 7
(‘Identity’), the notion of ‘Europe’ might be said to be the result. The ‘rape’ of Europa
by the bull Zeus (Jupiter in Roman mythology) is one that happens in the waters
of the Aegean Sea, giving Constantinople/Istanbul huge symbolic importance.
Other writers on Byzantium include: Whittow, on the early Byzantine Empire,
from 600 to 1025 (Whittow, 1996); Michael Angold, on the period 1025–1204
(Angold, 1997), which is particularly concentrated on the political history of
Byzantium; and John Julius Norwich’s three volumes covering the period up to 1025
and then that until 1453 (Norwich, 1990, 1992, 1995). On the culture of Byzantium,
see Khazhdan and Epstein (1985). Certainly, if culture is a vector of empire and
integration, it has its supreme manifestation in religious culture, and most specifi-
cally in the cultures of Christianity and Islam. This theme is also discussed at length
by Judith Herrin (1989) in The Formation of Christendom, as well as by Peter Brown
(2003), The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, 200–1000.
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Its successor empire in the Middle East and Europe, that of the Ottomans, also
merits treatment at length, but will have to wait for a subsequent edition of this
book. There are many excellent treatments of its long (1300–1923) existence
(Kinross, 1979; Faroghi, 2005; Finkel, 2006). Its successor in Anatolia, modern-day
Turkey, has a rich and enduring tradition from both Byzantium and the Ottomans,
as well as multiple Western influences, and makes it a fascinating crossroads for
many cultures and influences of all kinds (Findley, 2005; Stone, 2011).
Mongol Empire
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EUROPEAN EMPIRES
The ‘European’ empires, all of which were outgrowths of modern nation states since
about 1700, are those that mostly directly affect our contemporary world, and in a
short chapter like this we have to leave quite a lot out. Here we have chosen the
British Empire as it might be said to have the widest and deepest impact, though
some might disagree. It also has the advantage of having most of its literature in
English. Certain key parameters clearly also help us organize analyses of them, as
they also divide them all. Key among these is the influence of the ‘domestic’ on the
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‘international’, and vice versa. ‘Globalization’ owes much of its impact to imperial
ventures and the results continue to reverberate, as they do for all the empires we
have discussed so far. Historical thinkers like J. A. Hobson, who made the link
between colonial expansion abroad and social control at home (Hobson, 1902/2005;
Porter, 1968/2007), or Lenin (1916/2000), about the links between imperialism
and war (q.v.), were not merely thinking about the British Empire, but the way
that nexus played out was different from, say, the French experience of empire. The
racial and gender politics of the great modern empires all had their roots and being
in social Darwinist theories, but all of them manifested this in different ways.
Decolonization was equally not the same in all imperial settings, but had the same
roots in the decline of European power and rise of alternative centres, such as the
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United States.
So, while we have to be careful about making trite comparisons, it has to be
said that the communal experience of the imperial powers and their imperial vassals
have a certain synergy, often expressed in joint ‘events’, like the ‘Scramble for Africa’
after the Berlin Conference of 1878. On this ‘partition’ of Africa, see Förster,
Momssen and Robinson (1988) and Wesseling (1996), while for those who would
liked to further explore the imperial experience of the Netherlands, see Kuitenbrouwer
(1991) and Israel (1995). For Belgium, see Anstey (1996) and Nzongola-Ntalaja
(2002); for France, Aldrich (1996), Chafer (2002) and Thomas (2005); for Germany,
Louis (1967); for Italy, Ben-Ghiat and Fuller (2005). A good short introduction
to all of these can be found in Andrew Porter’s (1994) European Imperialism, 1860–
1914. A very good collection that looks at the relations between imperial regimes
(and with the United States) can be found in Christopher Thorne’s Border Crossings
(Thorne, 1988). One that compares the decolonization of the various European
empires can be found in Crises of Empire, 1918–1975 (Thomas, Moore and Butler,
2008).
The literature on the British Empire is vast. The best introductions are still by
Denis Judd, Ronald Hyam and Bernard Porter (Judd, 1997; Hyam, 2002; Porter,
2004), while the most recent ‘IR-related’ accounts are by Niall Ferguson (2003a,
2003b). For the impact on Britain itself, see Andrew Thompson (2005) and David
Cannadine (2001). Bill Nasson’s book (2004) on how the British made a ‘British
World’ is fascinating, and Ashley Jackson (2009) is both serious and amusing in the
‘mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun’ school of imperial reflection.
There are, of course, also very serious tomes on the political and economic history
of the Empire (Andrews, 1984; Cain and Hopkins, 2002 – to name but a few),
as well as an Oxford and a Cambridge series on the history of the Empire (with
volumes too numerous to mention, though Marshall, 2001, is a good, illustrated
one-volume summary).
Great Britain saw its empire as a ‘New Rome’. As Parchami says ‘[b]y the
1880s, the leading exponents of Empire proclaimed Britain to be the one and only
heir to Rome’s imperial mantle’ (2009: 61). But the origin of the British–Roman
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relationship was not auspicious. Gibbon did not have an unduly high opinion of
the Roman motivations for the conquering and holding of the province of
Britannicum – ‘the pleasing though doubtful intelligence of a pearl fishery attracted
their avarice … After a war of about forty years, undertaken by the most stupid,
maintained by the most dissolute, and terminated by the most timid of all the
emperors, the far greater [but only as far as present-day Perth] part of the island
submitted to the Roman yoke.’ As for the natives, ‘they possessed valour without
conduct, and the love of freedom without the spirit of union’ (Gibbon, 1776/
1981: 30).
Britain has since remedied the ‘union’ part of that stricture, even if the said
union is not as solid as it once was. What used to cement it was arguably threefold
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– an empire of its own, which gave gainful employment to many of its subjects,
and in particular the troublesome Celts from Scotland, Wales and Ireland; a world-
beating economy, that provided the rest of the world with, among other things,
a model for industrial and trading development which still underpins the thinking
of development economists today; and, most importantly, a robust dislike of for-
eigners and their ways. On a positive front this ‘union’ was a useful model for British
intellectuals and policymakers (and especially Scots) when they looked to other
forms of union, whether that be federal with the United States and the ‘freedom-
loving peoples’ (see Williams, 1998, for a discussion of such luminaries as Clarence
Streit), or within a League of Nations, or, for some, within a European Union.
The first of these unifying forces, empire, is what interests us here. It gave rise to
a particular ‘Britannic Vision’, in the words of David McIntyre, which he
describes as a ‘world where independence and unity could be combined’, or what
Conservative British politician Leo Amery called ‘independence plus’. McIntyre
quotes Canadian Premier Robert Borden as calling the British Empire/Commonwealth
a ‘union in amazing diversity through governance, founded on freedom and
co-operation’ (2009: ix). But this empire was established at a time (the late nine-
teenth century) when many within the country believed Britain to be in rapid decline
– the Empire was constructed to give Britain guaranteed markets and sources of raw
materials in flagrant disregard for Britain’s previous great economic invention of ‘Free
Trade’. It was done out of an ‘urgent need to rouse the people from apathy or domes-
tic quarrels in some larger purpose’, in the words of Joseph Chamberlain (Fraser,
1966: xv) – in other words to galvanize the domestic political scene by looking
beyond it to a greater purpose. The idea of creating a ‘Greater Britain’ was thus done
partly out of a desire to protect the original one and to cement the world order that
Britain believed it had created, not without reason (Bell, 2007). The implications of
this for the notion of ‘liberal internationalism’ are further explored by Casper Sylvest
(2009a).
However, the sad truth was that, by the 1890s ‘Great Britain, for all her territo-
rial pomp and splendour, was without allies and openly disliked by many in Europe
and the United States. “Splendid Isolation” was in fact uncomfortable and costly;
a rationalization of a predicament, not a calculated policy’ (Judd, 1977: 188). By
1900, it was painfully obvious that Britain needed allies in its desire to stay free
and to spread its influence, no matter how powerful it looked to outsiders. Where
was this to come from? In two world wars, the Pax Britannica, or British world
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‘order’, was maintained but hung by a thread in 1918 and was totally superseded by
a Pax Americana in 1945 (Williams, 1998; Parchami, 2009). It was too dispersed
geographically and based on ideas that were either too limited in their appeal
(‘Britishness’) or too disruptive in their results (‘parliamentary democracy’, for
example) to give the empire true longevity. Gibbon had believed in 1776, in Decline
and Fall, that Britain had created a true ‘Roman’ empire, untainted by corruption
and decadence – ‘the reflections which illustrate the fall of that mighty Empire
[Rome] will explain the probable causes of our actual security’ (Gibbon, quoted by
Vogt, 1993: 3). Within a few years America had been lost, the French Revolution
had been unleashed and all seemed in chaos.
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The two major schools of thought on the origins and results of the British Empire
see their exact reflection in the theoretical debate described above about liberal/
conservative and radical/ poststructuralist views of IR. The first, epitomised by
historians like Robinson, Gallagher and Denny (1961), Peter Cain and Anthony
Hopkins (Cain and Hopkins, 2001) and many others, shows an empire created
almost ‘by accident’. Some see the results in more beneficial than negative terms
(Ferguson, 2003a, 2003b; Lal, 2004) as they created the ‘Pax’ (‘order’) that is
necessary for commerce and prosperity to grow. The second sees probable malev-
olent intent and, certainly, disastrous consequences. The leader of this group is
difficult to select, but two clear candidates must be Edward Said and Noam
Chomsky, whose many books decry the results of British imperialism in the
Middle East for creating the problems of that area, though Chomsky does tend to
blame the United States more than the British ‘poodle’ for the ‘failed states’ that
have resulted (Chomsky, 2003, 2007; Said, 1979, 1993). It must be said that a
number of ‘non-radical’ historians like Louise Fawcett (2005) and Margaret
Macmillan (2001) agree that the British breakup of the Ottoman Empire has had
disastrous consequences for the subsequent development of the region. Even the
most dedicated supporter of the ‘civilising mission’ of the British Empire would
have trouble justifying such acts as the Opium Wars of 1839–1842 and 1856–
1860 which did so much damage to (and also to create) China (Lovell, 2011), or
the brutal suppression of the ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857–1858 (Fremont Barnes,
2007; Spilsbury, 2008). Historically there were many ‘critics of Empire’ within
the ranks of the radical and socialist Left within Britain (Porter, 1968/2007;
Claeys, 2010) who merit a solid chapter of any book on empire, had we the
space.
The management of the decline of, and extraction from, empire was another
particular trait of the British imperial experience, though not, of course, unique to
it. Many historians have stressed the positive and negative sides of this experience
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(for one inspiring collection, see Louis, 2006). Others point out that it was in fact
a ‘decline, revival and fall’ (Gallagher and Seal, 2004) as Britain lost one empire in
the eighteenth century and gained another one in the next. Indeed, we could almost
say Britain lost ‘two’ empires, as well as one in 1453 to the French, at the end of the
Hundred Years’ War. As Oscar Wilde might have said, ‘to lose one empire may be
regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness’.
On the positive side we can point to the idea of the ending of empire leading
to the creation of a freedom-asserting ‘Commonwealth’. The trope of ‘Freedoms at
Midnight’ is particularly striking (for a good recent collection on this, see Holland,
Williams and Barringer, 2010). Indeed some historians have accentuated the very
success of the British spreading the idea of democracy for its decline. The (largely
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consolidated in the late nineteenth century, and had been dismantled by the 1960s,
the British Commonwealth is a living proof of the longevity of at least the ideal of
democratic governance. So a contrary view is embedded in the above-mentioned
historical analyses of both British thinking on Empire and World Order (as in
Bell, 2007; Sylvest, 2009a), but also in the institutional results of the handover of
power by Britain to the United States (q.v.) and the setting up of the League of
Nations (q.v.) and the United Nations (q.v.). This thinking, now being ably led
by historian Mark Mazower, gives us to reflect that the United Nations in particular
has colonial origins and that these origins are therefore founding flaws in these
institutions that still need to be addressed by policymakers and intellectuals alike
(Mazower, 2009b), a theme that will be further explored in Chapter 6 (‘International
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Organization’) (q.v.).
Russian–Soviet Empire
The emergence of the Czarist Russian Empire was one of the great creations of the
modern period. It was created by an awesome mixture of brutal human agency and
a lack of real opposition in its formative period, the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, when the rival imperial power in the Baltic, Sweden, was decisively
defeated in the battles of Narva (1700) and Poltava (1709) (Englund, 2002). In the
south the Ottoman Empire was in rapid decline and the British were largely engaged
elsewhere, though there were points of friction in South Asia (Afghanistan, India,
Persia), collectively known as the ‘Great Game’ of the nineteenth century (Hopkirk,
1992). The architects of the Czarist Empire – Czars Peter the Great, Catherine
the Great and her field marshal lover, Prince Potemkin, have had many biographers,
the latter couple having been immortalized most recently by Simon Sebag Montefiore
(2005a).
Some would dispute the claim that the Soviet Union (USSR) was, in fact,
an ‘empire’. It had an explicitly anti-imperial ideology; indeed, it claimed it was in
fact ‘socialist’. It was not a ‘colonial’ empire like the British or French empires, but
it was nearly as big as both. But, as Michelle Birgerson points out, in many other
ways it was such an entity: ‘Empires consist of a center and a periphery … Politically
the center dominates the periphery … Nationally the center represents the home-
land of a nation that is distinct from the nations of the periphery. Empires are
political systems based on a power relationship between the center and the periph-
ery and involves the control of the center over the periphery … Hence the distribu-
tion of power overlaps with the issue of nationalism.’ In the USSR, the national
question was thus key in both its development and the manner of its ending
(Birgerson, 2002: 9–10).
In 1947, George Kennan, then a State Department official who had served for
many years as a diplomat in Riga, Latvia (before the establishment of diplomatic
relations with the Soviet Union), and in the 1930s and 1940s, latterly under
Ambassador Averell Harriman, asked the key question in Foreign Affairs about ‘The
Sources of Soviet Conduct’ (Kennan, 1947). He had previously asked it many times
in private, notably in the ‘Long Telegram’ (Kennan, 1950), and came to epitomize
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the attitudes of ‘the Riga Axiom’, one of profound distrust for Soviet intentions
throughout the Cold War (q.v.). Kennan the historian was well aware that the
‘sources’ were proximately to do with a Soviet ideological commitment to protecting
the Soviet Union but also to the concept of world revolution. As many historians
have pointed out since, the key to understanding why Russia has wanted, and
been seen as, an ‘empire’ for a period since at least Czar (Emperor) Peter the Great
(reigned 1682–1725) is that the key to its geopolitical existence and identity has
been remarkably constant ever since the Mongol Empire (q.v.) was expelled during
the reign of Ivan the Terrible (1533–1588), the first true Czar to establish Russia as
a fledgling nation state (Perrie and Pavlov, 2003). Since then, as Dominic Lieven has
put it:
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The sheer extent of its contiguous borders meant that the defence of those frontiers
against attack was always going to be difficult (and it was invaded many times, notably
by Napoleon and Hitler), but also that its political strength directly affected its
ability to expand or forced it to contract, in a process dubbed ‘expansion and coexis-
tence’ (Ulam, 1968; see also Ulam, 1984). Hence Czarist Russia lost Finland,
the Baltic States and Poland in the chaos after 1917, and regained the Baltic states in
1940 (and Poland as a ‘protectorate’ in 1947) and then lost them again in 1991.
Geopolitical factors thus link into political actions in very specific ways and dictated
the expansion of the Russian people into one of the greatest land empires the world has
ever seen.
Ivan the Terrible set a standard for a centralizing and brutal state that has
been lived up to many times since, both under the Czars and since 1917 and the
Bolshevik Revolution. Rule by ‘terror’ was initiated by Ivan and imitated by all of
his successors, with the Soviet ‘Gulag’ (complex of concentration camps) not fully
dismantled until the 1990s (Conquest, 1968, 2007; Applebaum, 2003). Karl Marx
saw Czarist Russia as ‘asiatic’, by which he meant brutal and backward, and only
learned to read Russian in the last few years of his life (Molnar, 1975; Chan and
Williams, 1994: 59). It is difficult to say what he would have thought of his disciples
and successors in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and especially Leon
Trotsky (the first Commissar for Foreign Affairs), Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Joseph
Stalin, who between them ruled Soviet Russia for most of the period 1917–1953
and who ruled with an iron ideological fist. This system of control allowed only for
a dominant Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPUSSR) that was frequently
violently purged until the 1950s. Historians were not all negative about the USSR,
with E. H. Carr’s monumental Bolshevik Revolution series spanning most of the
period until the Purges of the 1930s (Carr, 1952, 1954, 1959, 1971/1978) and
R. W. Davies marvelling at the feat of social engineering that the USSR represented
(for example, Carr and Davies, 1979; Davies, 1980).
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Marxists, such as H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Jean-Paul Sartre for use as
‘Fellow Travellers’ (Caute, 1988, 2003) as well as lower-profile ‘agents of influence’
(Andrew and Gordievsky, 1990; Andrew and Mitrokhin, 1999). The USSR in effect
ran a direct foreign policy through the Soviet Foreign Ministry and an unofficial
one through communist parties, fellow-travelling organizations (usually infiltrated
like the PEN, an international writers’ union) in what was termed by William
Gillies, the International Secretary of the British Labour Party until 1946, ‘the
Communist Solar System’ (Williams, 1989).
Dissidence, or internal opposition, was by no means expunged in any of the
imperial phases of the various Russian epochs. There are cultural and literary
overviews (Figes, 2003); and many on dissidents, from Maxim Gorki in the late
nineteenth century (Mother, Gorki, 1907/1949, was a great favourite of the Soviet
state apparatus) through to Solzhenitsyn in the 1970s and 1980s (banned in the
USSR until the late 1980s: Solzhenitsyn, 1973, 2000, are good examples). One
good recent overview of this phenomenon of cultural dissent under the Czars
and Soviet leadership is by Philip Boobbyer (2005). Indeed with Russian or Soviet
literature, art and other cultural forms, it is often impossible to distinguish the
‘politics’ of empire from the ‘art’. Russian and Western literary contributions have
added to the partial and yet rich imaginary of the Russian/Soviet imperial experi-
ence. Many writers have chronicled the treatment of dissent in the USSR, with
punishment often being meted out, usually by Stalin, to some of the USSR’s greatest
leaders, notably Bukharin and Trotsky, but with many more examples (Cohen,
1971; Deutscher, 1954–1963/2003).
The dissolution of the Soviet Empire was, on the face of it, very peaceful.
The whole of the old ‘East Bloc’, which had all fallen under Soviet influence in
1944–1945, declared themselves independent with scarcely a shot fired, even parts
of what had arguably been the old Czarist Empire like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Much of the credit for this has been given to the last General Secretary of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev (1999; Sakwa, 2008).
There was a short and vicious war between the new Republic of Moldova and
the break-away state of ‘Transdniestr’ in 1992, which left the new republic divided,
as it still is at the time of writing (King, 2000). There has been an ongoing and
extremely vicious war in Chechnya that shows no sign of abating, though that is
strictly speaking not ‘post-imperial’, as the province is still part of Russia. Ironically,
perhaps, there has also been a deal of what might be called a ‘Cold War nostalgia’
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literature, linked to a feeling that empires are by their very nature more stable
and orderly than a shifting system of smaller nation-states. Perhaps the best discus-
sion of this is in Mearsheimer (1991). The ‘bipolarity’ of the Cold War standoff
between the United States and the USSR did indeed have elements of ‘stability’,
but it also carried with it the constant fear of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ (appro-
priately ‘MAD’) and a huge lack of freedom for all the subject peoples of the former
‘East Bloc’.
The other main candidate for a truly European empire in the recent past came
from the vision of the National Socialists in Germany. They also talked about a
Greater Europe, in which all the peoples of the area could feel at home. The problem
was that this empire excluded more than it included, and not merely ‘undesirables’
like Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally challenged and Jews, but also Slavs and
anyone deemed not quite up to scratch (Mazower, 2008). The Nazis and Italian
Fascists deliberately used the iconography of the Roman Empire for themselves –
eagles, the lictors (Roman magistrates), fasces, the standards, parades and architec-
ture, but they denied the peoples of Europe (even after subtracting the above,
who did not qualify) any proper rule of law, access to the potential wealth of a
unified Europe or any kind of peace. George Kennan saw the probable demise of the
Nazi Empire as early as 1940 when he was based in Oslo for the German invasion
in its refusal to accept anyone who was not ‘Aryan’. The Nazis themselves wiped out
many of their best men and women in insane military expeditions that made the loss
of the Roman legions in the German forests in 9 ce look like a White House Tea
Party. Kennan did not believe that it could be a lasting victory because of the implicit
lack of universality in a message of German racial superiority (Kennan Papers,
Princeton, 1940). If war does not lead to an inclusive peace, can it be successful and
lasting?
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‘expansionism’ as the preferred term and others are still reluctant to accept the term
(Maier, 2006).
However, some recent historians of the United States, including notable
conservative American figures, including Robert Kagan and Walter Russell Mead
(Kagan, 2006a; Mead, 2002) and British historians like Niall Ferguson and Andrew
Roberts (Ferguson, 2004; Roberts, 2006), have made a robust case for the United
States being obliged to take its obligations for international leadership seriously
as the ‘leader of the Free World’ since the outbreak of the Cold War, and even more
so since the end of that confrontation. Liberal historians and political scientists like
John Ikenberry and Joseph Nye have made the same point in less historical mode,
as defenders of Western values like human rights, as well as institutional structures
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like the United Nations, etc. (Ikenberry, 2001, 2006). The United States, says Nye,
is ‘bound to lead’ (Nye, 1991).
The iconography of the American Republic has always consciously echoed that of
Imperial Rome, but that symbolism was largely confined to the North American
and American continent until 1914. Kagan and Mead show how much this power
was based on Roman and Greek forms of power and influence (Kagan, 2006a;
Mead, 2002). Distinctions along these lines have been made as to whether Greek
(‘normative’) or Roman (‘military’) power is most effective in exerting influence
in any ‘imperial’ situation, no matter which power is hegemonic in any given con-
figuration of the international system (Lundestad, 1998).
Be that as it may, it is clear that World War I marked a decisive breaking-free
from this geographical constraint and President Woodrow Wilson gave the oppor-
tunity for a first demonstration of what American power could do on the world
stage, though it must be said one of his immediate predecessors, Theodore Roosevelt,
also harboured global ambitions for the United States. In 1917–1918, the United
States played an important, and maybe even decisive, role in defeating Germany and
forcing that country to sue for peace. Wilson’s ‘14 Points’ of January 1918 (q.v.)
were one basis for what became the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Wilson aspired to
bring about the ‘end of war’, even a ‘New World Order’ (Knock, 1992; Williams,
1998). Subsequent writers have asked to what extent Wilson’s ideas and actions were
determinate, with some arguing that his legacy has left the world with ‘the ideas that
conquered the world’ (Mandelbaum, 2002). Wilson has certainly been the most
quoted American president in terms of being the main originator of a twentieth-
century record of American ‘democratic interventionism’. Scholars like Stanley
Hoffman claim that ‘Wilsonianism’ is a force in American politics that defies neat
compartmentalization into ‘left’ and ‘right’, but is rather rooted in a common under-
standing of ‘American exceptionalism’ (Anthony, 2008).
This project was certainly renewed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
who is widely accepted to have been a ‘realistic Wilsonian’ in the words of David
Reynolds (1981, 1991, 2006). There has been much discussion among historians
about the nature of American ‘Post-War Planning’ for an American-dominated
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international system, with some very interesting more recent work being done
on the geopolitical thinking that was part of that, such as that of Isaiah Bowman
(Smith, 2003). The role of the United States in the creation of a United Europe
to simultaneously unite, pacify and render it prosperous has been a major benefit
for both parties (Harper, 1996). Through such declarations as the Atlantic Charter
of 1941 and the absorption of British bases as part of the ‘Lend–Lease’ agreement
of the same year, Roosevelt laid the foundations for a United States with global
reach, which still sees the country as the only power capable of fighting a war on
at least two fronts and with full command and control capability, currently being
demonstrated in Afghanistan and Iraq. So the United States is accepted as the leader
of the West, the question that might be asked is whether that means it has an ‘empire’
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or, if it has, whether that has been beneficial or destructive? After 1945, the United
States has often been seen as a ‘conqueror’, starting with its relationship with
Germany and Japan (Beschloss, 2002).
In terms of influence, it might be argued that American power has been most
noticeable in successfully spreading its ideas and practices of a lightly regulated,
but rule-based system of capitalist economic progress, linked, more vaguely, to the
ideal of human rights (though arguably the European Union has done more to
foster that). This was strongly linked to the use of the Marshall Plan in the 1940s
and 1950s to get Europe back to prosperity with the implicit military guarantees
provided by bases round the globe and organizations such as the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO), which will be discussed in Chapter 6 (‘International
Organization’) (q.v.). Such thinking has become received wisdom as in the following
statement by Simon Bromley:
This reasoning, of course, has its merits, even if it assumes that economic power
is the key, though Bromley also accepts that the world now accepts American
ideas of democracy – he approvingly quotes Ikenberry’s statement that we live in
an era of ‘global empire … not essentially an American empire but rather an
empire of capitalist democracy’ (Bromley, 2008: 203).
To continue and echo the imperial theme as applied to other examples, the
USA has also been compared many times in recent years to a declining imperial
power. Perhaps this is the fate of all empires, as they are said usually to be declining
as soon as they rise. As far back as the 1980s, scholars like Robert Keohane were
talking about ‘the end of hegemony’ (Keohane, 1984), and many others since
have written about the ‘decline of the West’ (Coker, 1998). Much of this thinking
is based on the relative shift in economic power attendant on the shift in economic
numbers from the stratospheric heights of American dominance in 1945 to the
relatively lower dominance of the 1980s and 1990s. Coker was also referring to a
decline in the strength of the American link to Europe as well as the re-emergence
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of a number of ‘sensibilities’ within Europe and indeed within the USA itself – the
USA would look increasingly to the West and South and forget the Old Continent
(Coker, 1998). Others, such as Charles Kupchan, see American power as having
reached the limits that always befall such enterprises through strategic overreach
(Kupchan, 2003).
As for the prospects of imperial victory in Afghanistan and Iraq, maybe our
leaders should take more notice of the problems of subduing ‘barbarians’ noted
by Gibbon and Momssen, not to mention reading the Romans themselves. In his
writings on the subjugation of the Numidians and their king, Jugurtha (111–105
bce), Sallust pointed to the importance of a solid home front in the (then) war on
terror – then, as now, ‘some grieved for the glory of the empire, others – unaccus-
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tomed to the circumstances of war – feared for freedom’ (Sallust, 2007: 82).
A EUROPEAN EMPIRE?
Other see alternatives emerging (China, Brazil, India, etc.) and, most notably for
the purposes of our discussion, the European Union. John Cormick, for example,
argues that the United States has shown its essential weaknesses in the wars
since 2001, and that ‘power can transcend states, can be expressed without resort to
force, and can just as likely be latent and implied as it can be active and explicit’.
This he sees in the ‘new confidence’ of Europeans, the internal problems of the
USA itself, economic particularly, and the evident decline of American influence
abroad under the George W. Bush presidency. What we are now seeing, he argues,
is the emergence of a European ‘superpower’ (Cormick, 2007: introduction).
We might argue that what successful ‘imperial’ (or indeed ‘dominant’) powers do
is galvanize the public of their day in enabling a coalescence of moral ‘good’
and their own ‘interest’ in periodic crusades to demonstrate their superiority in
various ways. The Blair government of 1997–2007, that of George W. Bush
in 2000–2008, and many others (Wilson and Roosevelt being very good US
examples) have used, and continue to use, both force and the evocation of moral
superiority in their leadership of imperial blocs in joint enterprises. However,
whereas the Anglo-Saxon powers can point to their leadership/followership in the
world wars, the Cold War, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., what scholars like Cormick would
have to show is how ‘Europe’ has played any such intellectual, moral or military role
in global affairs. Where was such leadership in the Balkans (a part of Europe, after
all), in Afghanistan or in the Middle East?
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
The first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru’s, ringing declaration in 1947
that ‘[a]t the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake
to life and freedom’ (Cannadine, in Holland et al., 2010: ix) might be said to be the
leitmotiv for history’s judgement on the whole concept of empire. Many thinkers,
of Left and Right, would agree with Raymond Aron, in 1959, that imperialism was
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In 1981, the great French historian Jean-Baptiste Duroselle wrote a not uncontro-
versial book entitled Tout empire périra: théorie des relations internationales (1981),
partly out of his frustration at the ahistorical nature of study of IR (plus ça change,
plus c’est la même chose?) but also partly because he believed, along with Paul Kennedy
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(1988) and Robert Keohane (1984), that the American ‘empire’ was also heading
for the rocks. All of these writers pointed to the increasing décadence (Duroselle’s
term for France in the 1930s; Duroselle, 1979) of the political elites, their compla-
cency and arrogance. All pointed to the growing feeling that the Vietnam War
(which ended in 1975) had shown up the weaknesses of American political,
economic and even social structures. But of course theirs was also a reference to
the age-old observation of all historians, that nothing permanent seems to last. All
empires have gone the way of Rome, and so will that of the United States.
One recurring theme in this and other ‘declinist’ literature is that of ‘imperial
overreach’. As we stressed above, that moment for Britain may have come at the
time of the ‘new imperialism’ of the 1880s and 1890s, when there was a huge
expansion of the territorial empire after the Treaty of Berlin in Africa, leading to the
catastrophe of the Boer War in 1899–1901. It could have been when Britain entered
World War I, losing vast numbers of its most creative young men and discrediting
its political institutions in the process, and was subsequently bankrupted by financ-
ing its Allies with American dollars. It then had to fight for years to get that money
back and to effectively hand over the Empire to the United States to save itself
from Nazi Germany with the agreements on Lend Lease and the Atlantic Charter in
1941 (Reynolds, 1981; Williams, 1998). Economic historians like Immanuel
Wallerstein point to the ‘Great Depression’ that started after 1873 for British decline
setting in. They also draw the parallel of the decline of the United States starting as
a result of the cost of the Vietnam War after 1967 (Wallerstein, 1987).
Duroselle, Kennedy and Keohane were all attacked for being too precipitate
in their judgements (though many others made the same point in the aftermath
of the collapse of the US financial system in 2007–2008). Samuel Huntington’s
rebuttal of the ‘declinists’ in Foreign Affairs (1988), and Henry Nau’s, as well as
Joseph Nye’s, major tomes (Nau, 1990; Nye, 1990) claimed, as we have seen, that
America was ‘bound to lead’. All asserted that there were no real alternatives to
the United States as a world hegemonic power but also that it still had dominance
in the things that really mattered: technological creativity, military power and social
impact (among other factors). The parallels with Rome are again striking between
these two great empires, based on economic clout, constitutional law and military
might – in the fourth century ce, Rome still had the greatest minds (many of whose
writings have survived in print to this day); the most disciplined and well-equipped
military forces, and their amphorae of olive oil (for which read ‘Coca-Cola’),
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empires or that of the Soviet Union – they were brought down by a combination
of internal and external forces. Adam Smith had a clearer explanation. In the last
sentence of The Wealth of Nations, in the chapter on how the ‘towns improve the
country’, he states:
The ordinary revolutions of war and government easily dry up the sources
of wealth which arises from commerce only. That which arises from the more
solid improvements of agriculture is much more durable, and cannot be destroyed
but by those more violent convulsions occasioned by the depredations of hostile
and barbarous nations … Such as happened for some time before and after the
fall of the Roman empire in the western provinces of Europe.
(Smith, 1776/1982: 520)
His view was that to rely too much ‘upon commerce and manufactures’ was
‘slow and uncertain’ and therefore dangerous, though his point above was based
on his belief that ‘the North American colonies, of which the wealth is founded
altogether in agriculture’ (Smith, 1776/1982: 515–516) had done much better
than much of Europe to that date, which was dependent on its trade and manufac-
tures. Maybe the main lesson for us is that imperial societies (and indeed states of
all kinds) that do not forget the need to diversify their basic strengths survive and
those that rely too much on one area of economic activity do not. Rome was too
dependent on the economic institution of slavery, Britain on trade and finance
(‘pecuniary capitalism’) and the United States, in Thorstein Veblen’s words, on ‘con-
spicuous consumption’ (Veblen, 1912/1994). If the next (potential) imperial power,
China, does not deal with its surplus of young men over women (Hudson and den
Boer, 2006) and its immense imbalance between rural poor and urban riches, it will
certainly feature in a future version of Smith’s 1776 classic.
This chapter shows yet again that the writing of history is a function of the
obsessions of the day as much as a factor of ‘pure’ scholarship. It would take a far
larger chapter than this to explain why empire is now getting a better press that it
did during the Cold War. But since 1991, many more commentators are praising
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link is difficult, but there is no doubt that Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State
Robert Lansing was not entirely wrong when he said in 1918 that self-determination
would turn out to be a dangerous idea to unleash, for (as Cherry Bradshaw puts it)
nation-building is indeed often ‘bloody’ (Heater, 1994; Williams, 1998; Bradshaw,
2008).
So is empire a better form of political, social and cultural organization than
the nation-state, itself a historically contingent phenomenon? Why choose one
new idea over a tried-and-tested old one? George Schöpflin identifies the key prob-
lems with empires as being ones of legitimacy, problems that democratic states
are supposed to solve. He points out that many empires claimed the ‘mandate
of heaven’ (the Chinese, for example) or the approbation of the Gods (or God), such
as the Holy Roman or Ottoman empires (2000: 138). But, of course, Friedrich
Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ meant the death of that justification, at least in the
now-secular West. The national principle put paid to the multinational empires
of the Russian Czars (and the Bolsheviks and their own form of secular religion),
a virus that was identifiably a result of the French Revolution, spreading across
Europe and the world (Skocpol, 1979, 1981; Chan and Williams, 1994). It also led
to the absurd situation where the old networks of commerce and cultural affinity
were broken up in the former British, French, Italian and other empires, as well as
in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, only to have to be replaced by the
European Union (an ‘empire’ in all but name) and other ad hoc systems like the
Commonwealth of Independent States in the former Soviet space, again dominated
by Mother Russia (Birgerson, 2002).
Hence the supposed solutions to the problems of empire have run into a
challenge that was also a product of the rise of the nation-state in Europe, and the
West more generally. Europe itself found that its nationalisms contributed not
only (in many, but by no means, all cases) to a stronger sense of pride and identity
(q.v.) and economic progress but also to nationalist competition that led to dissolu-
tion and war. This dilemma was put most famously by Norman Angell (1910),
when he spoke of the ‘Great Illusion’ that states could ignore their interdependence
(Ceadel, 2009). The ‘cure’ for this, as proposed by President Wilson in 1918,
was the breaking down of national barriers, free trade and a set of international
organizations (q.v.) to regulate what we now call ‘globalization’ (q.v.). It could be
argued that capitalism, which knows no borders, has itself contributed to the rise of
nation-states and to their inevitable decline. The main problem for the would-be
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Baker, Simon (2007) Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire. London: BBC
Books.
Kelly, Christopher (2006) The Roman Empire: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford
University Press.
Britain
Brendon, Piers (2008) The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire, 1781–1997.
London: Vintage.
James, Lawrence (1995) The Rise and Fall of the British Empire. London: Abacus.
Marshall, P. J. (ed.) (1996/2001) Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire.
Cambridge University Press.
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Online resources
The full text of Kennan’s famous article of 1947 about the USSR can be found at
http://www.historyguide.org/Europe/kennan.html
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CHAPTER 6
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International organization
The League of Nations … was an attempt to ‘apply the principles of Lockean liberal-
ism to the building of a machinery of international order … But this transplantation
of democratic rationalism from the national to the international sphere was full of
unforeseen difficulties.’
(E. H. Carr, 1939)
INTRODUCTION
It has often been argued that the study of IR is the study of war (q.v.) and of peace
(q.v.). The subject matter of this chapter, International Organization (IO), has often
been claimed by those who are advocates of peace, or at least a ‘cure’ for war, implic-
itly or explicitly. The field of IO is vast, so we have decided to concentrate on where
we might be said to have most ‘added value’ for a book like this, by concentrating
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INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION
both on the two main IOs of the last hundred years, the League of Nations (LON)
and the United Nations (UN), and in particular the period up to the end of the
1950s. Very good surveys of the period beyond that can be found, and of course
there is a vast theoretical debate within IR about the meaning and significance of
IO, which we will also leave for others, with the exception of the theoretical debate
that existed until the 1960s. What we aim to do here is to lay out the stall of (some
of ) the historical literature that is least likely to have been presented to IR students,
and even those taking courses in IO. This chapter is again intended to provide the
backdrop to what most IR courses already do well.
The history of IO really starts with the changes in thinking about peace (q.v.)
and war (q.v.) that we have discussed in other chapters. Peace movements through-
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out the nineteenth century had called for such structures to be set up (Cortright,
2008: 3; Howard, 2000: 62). The historical antecedents of the discipline also
show us that a major obsession linked to both of these is the question as to how
we actually foster peace and discourage warlike behaviour. So IR theory and
policymakers has often circled round the idea that humankind can somehow
organize itself to discourage warlike behaviour and encourage peaceful endeavour.
‘Realists’ among policymakers, states, people and intellectuals alike have argued that
such attempts will only ever mitigate the impact of violence in the international
system, and the (often crudely told) story is that we cannot change ‘human nature’,
which is inherently violent and warlike; the only actors that matter are states and
the international system is by its very nature ‘anarchic’ and not amenable to good
intentions thrashed out in committees of like-minded liberals. But of course this
is a somewhat ‘straw man’ debate. Even a cursory examination of many of the
key historical thinkers on IR more broadly, and IO more particularly, were hard-
headed practical conservative ‘realists’, like the first Director of the London School
of Economics and geopolitician Halford Mackinder and Conservative Minister
of the Blockade in World War I, Robert Cecil (Johnson, 2011). Equally some
who condemned IO as a fantasy were advocates of that ultimate ‘idealist’ fantasy,
socialism, like E. H. Carr. Also, many liberal internationalists were from policy
circles. This debate is one of the main themes of this chapter, one that contrasts
and develops liberal internationalist thinking as one side of a coin, and praxis and
realism as the other.
So at the head of the chapter we find this contrast expressed in the seemingly
contrary statements of E. H. Carr in The Twenty Years’ Crisis and that of Casper
Sylvest (2009b). Carr’s dismissal of all attempts at liberal world government as
mere statements of the desires of status quo states and organizations, has to be
set alongside his belief that IO as he knew it in the League of Nations by 1939
was not how he saw the potential for the United Nations if it was backed up by
real hopes of support from the Powers (Carr, 1939/1947, 1942, 1945). That need
for the exercise of power stands as a constant counterpoint to liberals who believe
that the evolution of IO is for the common good of all mankind. This chapter
might therefore be said to ask as its central question: Whether attempts at IO over
the last century are anything more than statements of the desire for the rich and
powerful liberal democracies to institutionalize their global power? Or, can we say
that the support shown by many small states, non-governmental organizations,
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trades unions and the like for IO reflects their belief that IOs give them the oppor-
tunity to have a voice that can speak to power? Small states were the greatest
supporters of the League of Nations, as were the decolonized states after 1945 for
the United Nations.
In attempting to answer this question a more subtle and interesting story
emerges when we look at the historical record of attempts by individuals, states
and non-state actors alike to encourage international cooperation and organization,
and it is to that record that this chapter will address itself. One of the key themes
that will be explored here is a mapping of the evolution of thinking about the
development of international political thought and action over the period since
the French Revolution (q.v.), with a particular emphasis on the period since
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about 1900 as it pertains to IO. There will inevitably be some overlap with our
other chapters, especially Chapters 2 and 3 (‘War’ and ‘Peace’ respectively).
Another theme will be to examine the way that war has been the greatest recur-
ring impetus behind the elaboration of international schemes and institutions,
and, allied to this, the role that Great Powers have played in the concretization
of such phenomena. It will be demonstrated that the emergence of IO has
indeed, as Carr says, more often than not been due to the desires of these states
to entrench their ambitions and their status quo positions, both by providing
mechanisms through which they can better push their interests, but also by provid-
ing safety valves for the dispossessed at any given point in history. It has also been
about both promoting and controlling the immense forces of what we now call
globalization to make sure that they are both efficiently used and channelled in the
direction desired by the liberal powers, a sentiment expressed above by Salvador de
Madariaga, Chief of the Disarmament Unit in the League of Nations Secretariat
from 1922.
This story will be told, as it was in previous chapters, by a brief overview of
the debate in the literature of IR more broadly, and then a more detailed examina-
tion of the evolution of historical thinking about IO at particular points in the past,
often in the context of the ending of a great war.
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on IO can be found in Amrith and Sluga’s ‘New Histories of the United Nations’
(2008).
Though of course there is some crossover between genres, we can propose that
IR as a field can be said to have split in how it examines IO as a phenomenon.
One branch of IR theory has pursued what might be called the ‘history of ideas’
(or ‘history of international thought’) route, which examines in some detail
the philosophical thinkers in their historical milieux, with Hinsley, maybe, as the
‘Godfather’ of this group. Another branch, to some extent following Claude, has
indulged itself in an ever more complex theoretical debate about what IO is for
and what it ends up doing in theory and practice. This next section will look at
some of the key ‘turns’ in that theoretical journey. We will start with the period
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of World War II, as other pre-1945 theories of IO will be looked at in the context
of the League of Nations.
Integration theories
The evolution of Europe from a network of feuding states into the European
Union is often quoted as a key example of how integration works to further the
cause of world peace through the setting up of IOs. James Goodby claims that,
to have this, there has had to be agreement on a variety of key issues: common
values; ‘almost certainly democratic values … a similar sense of identity or self-
image, transparency and some denationalising of defense establishments, and a rea-
sonably healthy economy’ (Goodby, in Kacowicz et al., 2000: 239). But in order to
get to this situation many wars have been fought, ended and started again.
The first of what Lucian Ashworth has referred to as several ‘IR subcultures’
on IO emerged largely from the thinking of one man, David Mitrany, whose
work is still described in terms used for few other writers on occasion. Chris Brown
has written that ‘[f ]unctionalism is the most elaborate, intellectually sophisticated
and ambitious attempt yet made not just to understand the growth of inter-
national institutions, but also to plot the trajectory of this growth into the future
and to come to terms with its normative implications’ (2001: 133). Mitrany was
also a very significant player in the postwar planning in Britain during World
War II (Williams, 1998), but then neglected for a long time after the 1950s, except
by A. J. R. Groom and Paul Taylor (1975). He has attracted some notable intellec-
tual attention of late, especially from Ashworth (1999); but also, in French (2003),
and Devin (2008). Although much of his thinking had its roots in the liberal think-
ing of L. T. Hobhouse and Leonard Woolf (author of International Government,
1916; see Wilson, 2003), and the socialist thinking of the socialist ‘planners’ of
the interwar period like G. D. H. Cole (Navari, 1995), he took this thinking a big
step further. He was being fairly conventional when he stated in 1941 that
‘[c]entralized planning and controls, for both production and distribution are no
longer to be avoided’. This was partly because of the exigencies of wartime and
the examples being given by Roosevelt’s New Deal and Stalin’s Five Year Plans,
but also because it was widely accepted by the 1940s that central controls were
necessary to save capitalism from its own worst excesses to fend off the extreme
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nationalism that was widely seen to have caused the war (Williams, 1998/2007:
124). Within Britain itself, his intellectual trajectory is perhaps the best example
of what the collaboration between ‘Libs’ and ‘Labs’ could produce before 1945.
Mitrany’s thinking was therefore just one aspect of a wider reflection on the nature
and purpose of the state. This was a debate that the free-marketers like Friedrich
Hayek (The Road to Serfdom, 1944/2001) lost until the 1970s to Keynesian ideas of
demand control.
Mitrany’s two main publications, The Progress of International Government (1933)
and A Working Peace System (1943/1966), elaborated a theory of international
politics that he dubbed ‘functionalism’. This had a number of major tenets. First,
he believed that economic, technical and other forms of ‘functional’ cooperation,
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Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des Lois (1748): ‘The state of things in Europe is that
all states depend on each other … Europe is a single state composed of several
provinces’ (1967: 162). This was echoed in the next century by Voltaire, Rousseau
and the international lawyer Emmerich de Vattel (The Law of Nations, 1758),
who also referred to Europe as a ‘single body’, albeit one divided into sovereign states
(Hinsley, 1967: 166). Earlier seventeenth-century lawyers, like Hugo Grotius,
author of De jure belli ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace, 1625), and Samuel
von Pufendorf, author of De jure naturae et gentium (1672), laid the groundwork
for the next several hundred years’ thinking about the state, and thus of the
possibility of IO (a good introduction to all of these thinkers can be found in Tuck,
1999).
We might see the emergence of what become institutions aiming at the cre-
ation and maintenance of what Kant called ‘perpetual peace’ in a reaction to the
above thinkers. Most of them saw the notion of what Bruno Arcidiacono has
called a ‘hierarchical peace’, one based on the necessity of monarchy, the ‘supremacy
of the strongest’ to keep order and impose some sort of discipline on the normal
state of international anarchy (Arcidiacono, 2011: chapter 1). This was a natural
feeling among Romans – especially after the messy end of the Republic – as well
as most Greeks, and all medieval thinkers. With Kant we find a first real reply to
those like Grotius and Vattel, whom he dismissed as ‘sorry comforters’, but he
had to find a response to many of his near contemporaries, like Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1712–1778), who found war to be a natural state of affairs between
states, one that was ‘born in the nature of society’ (naît de l’état social) (Rousseau,
1964). But even Rousseau, as well as in his predecessors – such as William Penn
(1644–1718), the non-conformist and Quaker founder of Pennsylvania – could
find some solace in the idea of a union, or even a federation, of states. In the
language of the Cromwellian revolution of the 1640s and 1650s, such an arrange-
ment might be termed a ‘Commonwealth’. This, said Penn, might restrain Princes
and their ‘Duels’ (Penn, 1693/1912, quoted in Arcidiacono, 2011: chapter 3).
In the early nineteenth century, and thus after Kant, the Marquis de Saint-Simon
also talked of the ‘reorganization of European society’ in similar federalist terms
(Saint-Simon, 1814), presenting his views for consideration by the Congress of
Vienna of 1814. Many other near contemporary thinkers and writers of the American
and French revolutions, including the Marquis de Lafayette and Benjamin Franklin,
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were agreed that Europe’s problems could only be solved by some sort of federation,
the origins of the later European Union, showing in particular its French and
American ancestry (Marriott, 1937; Hemleben, 1943; de Rougemont, 1961;
Hinsley, 1967). Kant was thus only a part of a wider reassessment of the notion of
sovereignty, albeit an important one.
Kant
of thinking about IO. His views have been well served by historians of ideas
and IR scholars, especially since the end of the Cold War (Brown, 1992, 2001;
Brown, Nardin and Rengger, 2002), and have been quoted by IR theorists, policy-
makers and historians of IO alike, particularly in the context of the normative
turn that IR took in the 1980s and 1990s. But his claim to be a father of IO is,
on the face of it, rather slim. The main text that is always quoted, Perpetual Peace
(Kant, 1795/1983), is really only a ‘celebrated pamphlet’, albeit one that sold
out in several weeks and also that was published at a great moment in time –
the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution (Gallie, 1978: 8). This work
had been prefigured by an Idea for a Universal History (c. 1785), in which Kant
had declared that ‘the problem of establishing a perfect civil constitution is depen-
dent upon the problem of a law-governing relationship between states’ (Gallie,
1978: 13). This linking of law, constitution and state was, of course, very much a
question of the IR of the day, with the United States breaking away from Britain
and the emergence over the next few years of ideas such as ‘le peuple’, ‘human rights’
and many other ideas that launched the need to rethink the relationship of the
individual to the state and wider institutions. Martin Wight was also an early IR
scholar to point to the ethical implications of Kant’s more purely philosophical
works, and his key concept of the ‘categorical imperative’. If we all have what
Kant calls a ‘duty’ to work for the happiness of others as much as for our own
happiness, then, as Wight puts it, ‘[t]he end of man must be something universal
and inclusive’, and this must have, as he said in Perpetual Peace, a structure that
will ensure that the philosophically grounded ‘harmony of interests’ (as Adam Smith,
among others, put it at the same time), is assured in practice (Wight, 2005: 68–76).
These ideas lay at the heart of a debate that resonated through the next century. It is
still at the centre of IR today and has particular resonance in the study and practice
of IO.
The French Revolution (q.v.) gave rise to a number of key ideas that we have
alluded to above – popular sovereignty, the new idea of the ‘nation’ and so on. The
nineteenth century saw the apotheosis of the attendant ideology of nationalism
as states formed largely on the basis of ethnic identity (q.v.) – mainly in Europe,
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but also in South America. But there were important moves towards international
cooperation that also created what Mitrany was later to call ‘functional’ interna-
tional agencies. The nation-state in Europe, as Montesquieu, Voltaire and Kant
had realized, was necessarily linked to all the others. In order to prosper there had
to be cooperation. At the Treaty of Vienna in 1815, many heads of state were
also keen not to allow the rise of new ‘Napoleons’. The autocracies of Europe,
and especially the absolute monarchies, were also determined to make sure that
the more wild ideas of 1789, such as popular sovereignty, were not allowed to
take hold. They of course failed, and the ideas of 1789 were to sweep through
Germany, Italy, Greece and many other parts of Europe, with greater or lesser
impact. So we can say that the nationalisms of the nineteenth century, as well as
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the emergent institutions that are the forerunners of modern IO, were born out
of war (Langhorne, 1982, 1986). They also responded to a deeply conservative
view of the world, one that has been identified by Henry Kissinger as representing
a ‘world restored’ (Kissinger, 1964), as an attempt to save the imperial powers of
Europe not supersede them. The most important result of the Congress system is
what is known as ‘conference diplomacy’ and the beginning of a never-ending series
of good stories about it. One of the most celebrated has French delegate Talleyrand
asking, after the Belgian delegate died, ‘[W]hat did he mean by that?’ The subtleties
of protocol were such that all the foreign ministers entered by separate doors.
A more serious precedent was the importance of procedure, and the coalition
(‘group’) behaviour that continues to this day. Harold Nicolson’s (1946) account
of the Congress of Vienna is a good source on this, as well as the increasing pro-
liferation of conferences that has reached fever pitch over the past hundred years
or so, as is Andreas Osiander’s (1994) placing of it in a much longer tendency
towards multilateralism. On the Congress of Vienna itself, a recent good account
comes from Adam Zamoyski (2008).
The political cooperative response to the French Revolution by what came
to be known as the Powers – Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia – was the informal
‘Concert of Europe’ established at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. This created
a mechanism where the Powers would meet as necessary to counter any threat to
the peace, an early form of what would be called ‘collective security’. But this
was not a coalition of ideas so much as a coalition of interests; more of a consolida-
tion of an existing balance of power. Alfred Zimmern summed it up as ‘the medicine
of Europe, not its daily bread’ (Zimmern, in Taylor and Groom, 1988: 12). All the
Powers were agreed that they needed, as it was stated at Vienna, to ‘uphold the
public order in Europe’, but did not agree on exactly how they wanted that order
to be (Hinsley, 1967: 194–197). As Andreas Osiander has put it (of the 1648 Treaties
of Westphalia), ‘[t]he conviction prevailed among the peacemakers that, provided
the rights of each of the participating actors could be established definitively,
so source of conflict would remain’ (1994: 48). On that occasion the ‘rights’ were
said to be those of sovereignty itself and of sovereigns to determine the religion of
their subjects.
As after Westphalia, the conferences that took place after Vienna rapidly revealed
the cracks that could appear between the sovereign interests of the Powers. The
Concert of Europe did not stop wars breaking out between them – most notably
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over the future of the Ottoman Empire, which led to hostilities between Britain
(with France) against Russia in the Crimea (Troubetzkoy, 2006: Figes, 2010),
but also over the future of Italy, where Austria and France engaged in substantial
combat in the 1860s. There were conferences that did resolve major problems, nota-
bly the one at Berlin in 1878 that purported to settle differences in the Balkans
(Medlicott, 1963), though this did not stop a series of wars breaking out before
1914 in the same region (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1914/1993;
also see below). Another Congress in Berlin in 1884 started what has been termed
the ‘Scramble for Africa’ (see Chapter 5, ‘Empires’) by setting out ground rules
for who could take what in the ‘Dark Continent’. The locals were not consulted,
of course. It was not to outlive the developments during this period of the alliances
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between Austria, Italy and Germany (The ‘Triple Alliance’) and the ‘triple Entente’
between Britain, France and Russia (Langhorne, 1981).
Some other relatively rare examples of inter-state cooperation in areas of
global interests occurred (and which became more commonplace in the twentieth
century), such as the Rush/Bagot Agreement of 1817, which led to the reduction
of naval forces on the Great Lakes in North America after the Anglo-American War
of 1812. The first proposal to limit national armaments was actually by Austrian
Chancellor Von Kaunitz (to Frederick the Great of Prussia) after the Seven Years’
War, a proposal that was not taken up (Wright, 1921: 9). ‘Declarations of Neutrality’
were also interesting harbingers of disarmament and other agreements – for
example, the declaration of the neutrality of the Canadian–USA border in 1839,
and the neutralization of the Straits of Magellan in 1881, the Suez and Panama
canals in 1888 and 1901 and (a first between states) Norway and Sweden in 1912
(confirmed formally in 1914 – Scott, 1989: 468). For neutrality and ‘neutralism’,
see also Lyon (1963), Karsh (1988) and Malmborg (2003).
Other examples of international cooperation were in the setting up of ‘functional’
organizations’. The link between these developments and the wider phenomenon of
industrialization is again well developed by Craig Murphy (1994). The Universal
Postal Union was founded in 1874, and the International Telecommunication
Union in 1865 (Codding, 1952; Taylor and Groom, 1988: chapter 10) helped to
facilitate the passage of information any mail, telegraph and then telephone, but
they did not necessarily reduce international tensions. The International Committee
of the Red Cross (1864) was set up to help wounded soldiers on the battlefields
of the war between France, Austria-Hungary and Italy over Italian reunification in
the 1860s (Moorehead, 1999). More substantial organizations and initiatives had to
wait until 1899, and again war was the impetus.
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Peace (founded 1910). At the state level, the period saw two major conferences
at the Hague (1899 and 1907) – to discuss measures for bilateral and multilateral
disarmament and the establishment of a crude system of bilateral treaties to try to
establish conflict resolution procedures through arbitration in the case of possible
outbreaks of hostilities. This Permanent Court of Arbitration was set up in 1903.
The Hague agreements are important for setting a new benchmark, not only for
the attempted limitation of arms and the peaceful settlement of international
disputes, but also because they mark an important awakening of public opinion
(especially in the United States, where the conferences gave a major boost to the
American Peace Society, which had been set up by Quakers in 1828). They most
emphatically did not lead to their primary goal, the limitation of armaments, though
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exploding (‘dum-dum’) bullets were not used in World War I. As scholars like David
Stevenson (1996) and Martin Van Creveld (2011) make clear, these pious declara-
tions banning new weapon systems, particularly in the air, were the precursors to
yet more developments in air power.
The period also saw the publication of a number of important tracts which
attracted considerable public attention, of which Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion
(1910) is probably the best example (Miller, 1986; Ashworth, 1999; Ceadel, 2009),
but also the significant writings of liberal and left-wing thinkers such as Henry Noel
Brailsford and James Bryce. These writings found their echo among continental
European thinkers and policymakers, of whom the most important is probably
Léon Bourgeois (1851–1925), who was a prominent official at both Hague
conferences and also played a key role in the elaboration in France of plans for a
Société des Nations, which had some impact on the final LON (Bourgeois, 1910; also
see below). His precursory ideas on ‘Solidarity’ can be seen as an important impetus
for continental thinking about ideas for a League (Bourgeois, 1896).
The Round Table group, founded in 1909, emerged from a much wider reflec-
tion among the intelligentsia and policymakers of the British Empire (then the
hegemonic Power on the world stage). Attempts to understand the dominant
British philosophical liberalism of the early part of the twentieth century can only
be understood in the context of the imperial era (q.v.). As Duncan Bell has pointed
out, most late Victorian Englishmen were fervent believers in ‘progress’, and
many ‘supported the utilization of political violence in the struggle for national
liberation.’ They were almost to a man great supporters of Kantian and other ideas
of federation, often (as with the Round Table group) through a ‘federal Greater
Britain and a re-union with America’. They saw the Empire as ‘civilising and having
within it a moral obligation to support [for example] the Indian people in the
quest for progress … The British, that is, were to act as the midwives of Indian
modernity.’ As Bell goes on to say, ‘[o]nce again, [there was a] heavily moralized
concern with what we might now call “nation-building” ’ (Bell, 2001: 559–580;
2007). These themes were translated into British thinking about ideal future world
orders, which had many of the supposed features of the British Empire, including
progressive moves towards a federally organized Empire, with states that were
linked by ties of language, culture and history. Cambridge historian J. R. Seeley
argued in the last 1890s for a ‘world state’, of which he believed a ‘Greater Britain’
could be one element, ‘composed of men who are in some sense homogeneous, and
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not only … in blood and descent, but also in ideas or views of the universe’ (Seeley,
in Bell, 2007: 109). He argued elsewhere in favour of other groupings, including
a ‘United States of Europe’, though he thought that might well founder on the
problem of incompatibility of race (Bell, 2007: 110).
In the USA before 1914, a number of famous successful entrepreneurs funded
thinktanks. The most famous of these is that associated with the largesse of Scots
steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, and its influential Presidents (former Secretary of
State) Elihu Root from 1910 to 1925 and Nicholas Murray Butler, 1925 to 1945.
The main aims of the Carnegie Endowment, then and now, were opposition to war
and the encouragement of better IO. A 1914 study of the Balkan wars of the period
reads with a certain freshness even today. It was republished in its entirety, with an
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If the minds of men can be turned for even a short time away from passion, from
race antagonism and from national aggrandizement to a contemplation of the
individual and national losses due to war and to the shocking horrors which
modern warfare entails, a step and by no means a short one, will have been taken
toward the substitution of justice for force in the settlement of disputes.
(Butler, in Carnegie Endowment, 1914/1993: preface)
Another way of putting it is that, in order to have a ‘positive peace’, there has
to be created ‘a social and political ordering of society that is generally accepted
as just’. So, whatever this may be seen as being (and there are many different
definitions of ‘just’), it is ‘certainly a far more complex affair than war’ (Howard,
2000: 2).
Such ideas, therefore, were already well in the air by 1900, and others took
them up. J. A. Hobson saw the potential – for good as well as ill – of Seeley’s
ideas in his classic Imperialism (1902/2005). Beyond Seeley-esque unions of
‘States … closely related by ties of common blood, language, and institution’,
he could foresee ‘the best hope of permanent peace on an assured basis of inter-
imperialism’ (Hobson, 1902/2005, in Bell, 2007: preface). The Round Table
group was inspired by, and largely merged from, Viscount Milner’s Kindergarten,
the body of young men that Milner recruited from Oxford University to oversee
the development of South Africa after the Boer War tried to put flesh on such
bones. John Buchan (author, among many other works, of The Thirty-Nine Steps)
referred to the ‘brilliant minds of the Round Table’ in 1906 (May, 1995: 2). The
Round Table journal was the most important-sounding board for British imperial
and federal thinking until the 1950s. Lloyd George described it in 1921 as ‘a very
powerful combination – in its way perhaps the most powerful in the country’ (May,
1995: 11). Prominent figures like Lionel Curtis and Philip Kerr (later Lord Lothian)
had ready access to imperial government circles across the globe. This group was also
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important as a vector for a much wider network, including figures like Lord Robert
Cecil (later the major British advocate of the LON), J. C. Smuts (South African
Premier and main architect of the LON’s mandate policy), Alfred Zimmern (prob-
ably the most important single interwar liberal thinker and LON advocate), as
well as key imperial advocates like Leo Amery (Colonial Secretary, 1924–1929 and
Secretary of State for India, 1940–1945).
The main product of such thinking was what we have come to call ‘liberal inter-
nationalism’, though by no means all of its adherents were members of a liberal
party, like Amery. While not by any means a purely British phenomenon, until the
1930s British thinkers were its predominant contributors. Before World War I,
another important precursor of LI was transmitted through the presence of James
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Bryce as British Ambassador to the United States between 1907 and 1913. He was
very close to Republican President William Howard Taft (term of office 1909–1913),
and had some influence on President Woodrow Wilson (terms of office, 1913–
1921), who like Bryce was a prominent constitutional lawyer. In Bryce’s thinking
there are, yet again, elements of wider British imperial thought, and he wrote one
of his most famous books as Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, The Holy Roman
Empire (Bryce, 1864), which was greatly admired by Queen Victoria herself
(Sylvest, 2009b: 154). The stress that he also put on the need for Anglo-American
cooperation was another important pointer towards the future evolution of IO. This
emphasis was also shared by the Round Tablers, and especially Kerr, who played
a distinctive personal role during World War I as a go-between with Washington
and (as Lord Lothian) was instrumental in getting Churchill and Roosevelt to
cooperate. In both cases, this led to enhanced Anglo-American discussions about
the LON and the UN.
LI has been defined as ‘an ideology aimed at grafting progress, order and justice
on to international politics, often through explicit analogy to domestic political
practice and experience, in order to make possible full realization of liberal values,
including freedom, individual and national improvement, and good government
based on the rule of law.’ In that LI was a project aimed at an ever-increasing
cooperation between states, not their extinction, ‘underwritten by expectations
of intellectual, moral and/or political progress’ (Sylvest, 2009b: 49), it was
markedly present in both the British and American elites before and during
World War I, and beyond (Parmar, 2004) making it the most important driving
theme among the Western Powers for IO and other forms of international
social engineering on vast and hitherto unheard of scale. Believers in LI think that
the economic and social sources of war are paramount and require international
cooperation to resolve. Others would have thought that Great Power manoeuvr-
ings were more to blame.
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The problem that confronted that, and subsequent generations, was how to go
about operationalizing these opposite sets of insights.
Again, the impetus was war – this time, World War I.
of speculation about how to make this the ‘war to end all wars’. A large number of
thinktanks also sprang up at this period, some that lasted well beyond the end of
the League itself, like the League of Nations Union (LONU) (Birn, 1981). The
LONU was not against the war per se and garnered support across the political
spectrum in Britain. Other groups that supported the idea of a League of Nations,
like the Union of Democratic Control (UDC), believed that a league could
actually replace the existing system of diplomacy with ‘open’ diplomacy, an idea that
Wilson consecrated in the first of his Fourteen Points of 1918 as ‘open covenants
openly arrived at’, and the last of them, number 14, as: ‘A general association
of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording
mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and
small states alike.’ This idea, more generally referred to as ‘collective security’, is
usually described as a ‘one for all, all for one’ idea, and has of course seen its apo-
theosis in the United Nations (Northedge, 1986).
But Wilson, though long on ideas, was by general consent not too good on
implementation. His main biographer, Arthur S. Link, says he was a ‘visionary,
unrealistic, provincial and ignorant of European problems’ (Link, 1971: 128). He
has been thus lauded as understanding the nineteenth-century idea that the Balance
of Power system was one of the key factors in constantly plunging Europe into
war and wanting to see ‘a community of power, not organized rivalries, but an
organized peace’ (as he put it in his ‘Peace Without Victory’ speech of January 1917),
but allowing himself to be manipulated by devious British and French politicians
into devising a League of Nations (LON) that suited these imperial powers much
more than the cause of IO (Harper, 1996: 30).
Writings on the LON fall into a number of important categories. First there are
biographies and autobiographies of some of the major players in the League. Probably
the best of these are by the main British architect of the League, Robert Cecil (1941,
1949; Johnson, 2011), though there is no life story of its longest-lasting secretary-
general, Sir Eric Drummond, but a very long one by his deputy, F. P. Walters (1952).
There are also major autobiographies and biographies of some of the main players
at the Versailles Peace Conference, such as Lloyd George (1932, 1938), Clemenceau
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(of which the best are Watson, 1974, 2008; Winock, 2007) and, of course, Wilson
himself (Link, 1972; Knock, 1992). This has been helped greatly by a new series on
all the major heads of delegation – Wilson (Morton, 2008), Clemenceau (Watson,
2008) and Lloyd George (Sharp, 2008a). Second, there is a fair amount published
on the writing of the Covenant of the League, of which the most complete is that
by David Hunter Miller (1928), and also Zimmern (1936). Recent surveys include
books by Fred Northedge (1986), Ruth Henig (1973), Gary Ostrower (1996)
and the work of Lorna Lloyd (in Armstrong, Lloyd and Redmond, 1996/2004).
But, third – and maybe most important for the student of IR – there are the descrip-
tive and theoretical musings of key thinkers of the time (Long and Wilson, 1995).
One stark contrast that emerges from reading the contemporary account is of
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course the split that emerges as a result of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the
rise of Hitler in Germany in 1933, in many ways respectively sounding the
economic and political death knell of the League. Before 1930, although Gilbert
Murray, in a survey of the League, could talk (in 1928) about the Ordeal of this
Generation, he still ends the book by saying that ‘by acting on the principles
of … civilization we must inevitably move towards the abolition of war among
the nations who share in it’. In another book of the same year, with a preface
by James T. Shotwell of the Carnegie Endowment, John Spencer Bassett could
say that ‘it seems we are justified in thinking that the power of the League is slowly
growing stronger’ (Bassett, 1928: 377). The 1924 ‘Geneva Protocol’ – in which the
American activist David Miller, as well as Shotwell and Butler, played a prominent
part along with Robert Cecil and British Labour Party IR specialist and academic
Philip Noel-Baker – was an attempt to give the League more teeth in any coming
conflict (Noel-Baker, 1925; Miller, 1925). This highlighted the fact that the United
States might not be part of the League, a factor often cited in its demise, but
that Americans nonetheless played a very important role. In 1928, the Kellogg–
Briand Pact to abolish war as means of inter-state activity (officially the ‘General
Treaty for the Renunciation of War’ or the ‘Pact of Paris’) was negotiated outside the
League, but accepted by the League Council, and peace activists claimed they had
the key to the end of violent conflict (Ferrell, 1952).
There was huge hope invested in the League idea, which could not help but
exalt, but also disappoint, those who were in contact with it, a sense of elevated
unreality even in the 1920s – Henry Morgenthau, later Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
Treasury Secretary, wrote that it was like ‘going to Athens’ (Morgenthau, 1929).
The LON was most emphatically not a total failure. It did prevent a number of
major conflicts from escalating into war in the 1920s, notably in the Aland Islands
(between Sweden and Finland) and in the Balkans, the proximate source of World
War I (Barros, 1970). The economic and social activities of the LON were by
far its most successful activities, leading to a raft of legislation in the International
Labour Organization and followed up in the United Nations by the Economic
and Social Council (ECOSOC) (Lloyd, 1997). But by 1933, with the clouds of
war gathering, Max Beer was talking at length about the League on Trial, though
the book was written in 1932 (Beer, 1933). By 1936, even one of its great believers,
Alfred Zimmern, was wondering whether the international rule of law that
(for him) the League represented should talk about ‘using the past or the present
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tense’, although he did try and ‘err on the side of optimism’ (Zimmern, 1936:
vii–viii).
Disarmament
In line with the long-established thinking of both peace movements and the
institutions that had resulted from The Hague agreements, disarmament figured
prominently among Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and has to be seen as a
touchstone of the LON’s long-term impact. The main institutional result was
the Preliminary Conference of 1927 and its successor, the Disarmament Conference
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of 1932–1933, in which the United States played a full part as well as the Soviet
Union (although neither were members of the LON at that point, and the United
States never was). The best sources for the origins of this are to be found in Philip
Noel-Baker’s Disarmament (1926/1972) and Salvador de Madariaga’s identically
titled work of 1929. De Madariaga, Director of Disarmament at the LON between
1924 and 1928, wrote in the interwar period that ‘the world has reached such a
degree of interdependence … that international cooperation has become essential
… the only self-supporting region of the world is the whole world … Only one
opinion and only one market cover the face of the earth’ (1929: 6). Armaments were
therefore an economic absurdity; war, a tragic net cost to humanity and only of
benefit to arms manufacturers.
The problem was that there were major ‘spoilers’ at work in the conferences.
The Soviet Union, a member of this conference even though it only formally joined
the League in 1934, professed to believe in total disarmament, proposing the
first ‘zero options’ in such talks (Williams, 1989; Kitching, 1999), but only to
stymie the seriousness of the talks. The United States would only deal with the
issue bilaterally – especially in a series of naval arms talks, most notably in Washington
in 1922. Germany pulled out of the talks in 1933, sounding their effective death
knell. (The best documentary review of these actions can be found in Henig, 1973:
chapter 3.)
The bibliography that is most often quoted on the LON is a long litany of failure.
Many writers on the League took their cue from the revulsion felt by many on the
Left and Centre about the League’s inability to deal with the Far Eastern crisis,
with the Geneva Racket (Dell, 1937) vying with later titles like Broken Star (Joyce,
1978). It must be said that it was often also linked to mainly postwar, post-facto
revulsion about the ‘appeasement’ of Nazi Germany by the democracies, and
especially Britain and France’s sellout at Munich in 1938 to a hubristic Adolf
Hitler. We need to try and separate out myth and reality in this literature. What,
for example, could the League have done in concrete terms to stop the Japanese
invading Manchuria in 1932? The Lytton Enquiry, set up to investigate the inva-
sion, was actually very critical of the Japanese government. Equally, how could the
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and Britain and France were at loggerheads over it much of the time. Equally,
although writers like Egerton (1974, 1978) and Williams (1998) have stressed
the pivotal role of Britain and the United States in setting up the League, other
historians, such as Brian McKercher (1990), have pointed to the fraught relations
between the United States and Britain, particularly in the 1920s, over a series
of issues, many of which had to do with the debt and reparations issues resulting
from the Versailles Treaty (Williams, 2006). Much of what really counted in inter-
national diplomacy between the two world wars was achieved outside the auspices
of the League, for instance, the Locarno Pacts of 1925.
In the League’s favour, the Bruce Report of 1939 pointed out that the social
and economic (or functional) agencies of the LON worked well and took up a large
proportion of the budget. The International Labour Organization (ILO) passed
a plethora of work-related international legislation that is still considered vital
for workers’ rights (Foggon, 1988). As we have seen, the tripartite structure of the
ILO was seen as a neo-functionalist model of its kind by Ernst Haas in the 1950s.
The League also passed legislation and implemented some very significant measures
against sex trafficking and drug abuse. It continued the discussions at ambassadorial
level that had given the Concert of Europe some real influence in the ‘Conference
of Ambassadors’, a far more ‘realist’ body than Carr (for one) would have acknowl-
edged (Pink, 1942).
The assault on what E. H. Carr has called the ‘utopian’ vision, presented both
by supporters of the LON and British and American liberals like Zimmern, is
worthy of a book in itself. The ‘idealist–realist’ or ‘First Great’ debate unleashed
by Carr with his famous book The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939) has produced its
own cottage industry (Long and Wilson, 1995, again, is the best summary).
The debate hinges around whether the interwar liberals were indeed foolhardy
‘utopians’, as asserted by Carr, or whether they rather engaged in a search for new
ways of understanding international politics with perfect cognizance of the imper-
fections of human constructions like the LON and a keen understanding of the
problems of practical international political action. Carr was inspired by Karl
Mannheim and Reinhold Niebuhr into thinking that, to be very summary, the
interwar liberals had allowed themselves to be carried away by the belief that the
LON and its instruments could actually change mankind, whereas in fact their
ideas were ‘historically conditioned, being both products of circumstances and inter-
ests and weapons framed for the furtherance of interests’ (Carr, 1939/1947: 68).
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In short he asserted they were representing their interests as being those of the rest
of humanity, which they were not, and that they were rather apologists for an unten-
able status quo. Hence Carr was an apologist for those who wished to revise the
Treaty of Versailles, an ‘appeaser’ of Germany and Adolf Hitler, as well as a great
admirer of Bolshevik Russia (Carr, 1952–1979: all of the ‘Bolshevik Revolution’
series; Haslam, 1999).
Carr was not against the idea of IO as such; rather the idea that any economic,
political or security ‘harmony of interests’ could be successful without taking into
full consideration the workings of power. Carr’s emphasis on what Charles Jones
calls ‘the rationalization by those in power … of their privileged positions’ (Jones,
1998: 236) has a clear echo in today’s debates about the ‘self-evident’ benefits of
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the free market. But if IO can be made to represent and reflect both power and
contrasting interests, then Carr was not against this per se. This is crucially laid
out in chapter 14 of the Twenty Years’ Crisis, which many IR academics do not
seem to have reached in their reading of the book. As a career diplomat in the
Foreign Office (1916–1936), and then as a journalist and academic, Carr disliked
what he saw as ‘utopian’ theorizing that ignored the dictates of the real world. Hence
his ‘realism’ was tempered in ways that many subsequent IR theorists did not
notice. He was not entirely wrong either, as a reading of Gilbert Murray’s rather
maudlin peroration, From the League to the UN, rapidly makes clear (Murray, 1948).
There was wishful thinking among prewar liberals of Carr’s acquaintance.
A new wave of scholars can be said to have understood this paradox and
begun re-examining the underpinnings in Carr’s work (Cox, 2000; Jones 1998,
Haslam, 1999), and this has had a knock-on effect on thinking about the ‘failure’
of the interwar thinkers to grasp the nettle of power. Some recent scholarship in
IR, especially by Wilson and Long and Lucian Ashworth, has taken the view that
in fact none of the interwar theorists were ‘idealists’ in the way they were painted
by advocates of the ‘realist–idealist’ distinctions of the 1980s. In short, the ‘idealist–
realist’ debate was a ‘myth’ that led IR astray for far too many years, helping to
drag down the LON in its wake (Schmidt, 1998a, 1998b; Ashworth, 2002, 2006).
In turn, this impacted on revisionist thinking about the LON and its supporters,
especially in Britain (for a discussion of this in the British Labour Party, see Ashworth,
2007). Carr was, it is safe to say, misunderstood at the time and for a long while
afterwards. Here we can show a clear interpenetration of IR theory and the histori-
ography of IO in a vital mutual effect that can now, indeed, be said to have relaunched
serious study of international historical thought in IR as a whole.
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history of the Security Council, the part of the UN system that most differentiated
it from the LON, describes that body as resembling Fifteen Men on a Powder Keg
(Boyd, 1971). No sooner had the UN been set up than it was submerged beneath
the realities of the Cold War (q.v.). This section of the chapter therefore looks
at some of the key works on the process of the UN’s creation and then at one
particular area that showed up both the positive and negative sides of that creation
and development – that of human rights.
Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson referred to his time at the centre
of power in the United States as being Present at the Creation (Acheson, 1969). It
was largely the vision of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (predecessor to
Acheson’s President Truman) – who conceived a ‘realistic Wilsonian’ alternative
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to the LON, one that had ‘teeth’ in the form of a Council whose resolutions
were binding over the entire UN – to replace the toothless League Council, whose
declarations were purely advisory. The story of Roosevelt’s vision has been told
in many places, by his biographers (Dallek, 1979; Schlesinger, 1957–1960) as well
as by historians, who see him as part of a pattern of American ‘visions’ of world
order (Harper, 1996) or as a president with a personal crusade (e.g. Hoopes
and Brinkley, 1997). The exact nature of this vision has been the subject of several
forensic analyses, both by participants in the process, such as Assistant Secretary
of State Adolf Berle (1961), State Department officials (the most thorough is Notter,
1949), the President himself (Roosevelt, 1950) and by historians (Williams, 1998;
Ikenberry, 2001; Mazower, 2009b).
All agree that the UN was seen at the time of the Dumbarton Oaks and San
Francisco conferences of 1944 and 1945 as one of the cornerstones of American
power. The organization of both of these conferences was a largely American
affair, held on American soil and with an American aim, a new form of League
that would bring in all the major Powers under one roof. But the groundwork for
this endeavour was a long and drawn-out process of Great Power diplomacy and
postwar planning in a number of capitals, notably London and Moscow, as well
as Washington. The ‘summit diplomacy’ that began with the signature of the Atlantic
Charter in August of 1941 continued through the rest of the war, culminating
with meetings between the ‘Big Three’ (the USA, USSR and Britain) at Quebec,
Moscow, Tehran (all 1943) and Yalta (1945), or the ‘Big Four’ at Potsdam (1945).
This led to horse trading about the design of the postwar world which largely
led to Britain agreeing to pass the baton of global power to the United States
(Reynolds 1981, 1991) and the USSR being given land rights over much of Eastern
Europe, in return for their cooperation in the new world body (Hoopes and Brinkley,
1997).
Unfortunately for the vision of Roosevelt and the drafters of the Charter, the
UN’s promise was not fulfilled in many ways until the end of the Cold War. The
two major differences between the LON’s Covenant and the Charter of the UN
were twofold. Herbert Nicholas commented that ‘San Francisco differed from
Versailles in its genuine respect for “open covenants openly arrived at” ’ (Nicholas,
1967: 8). There was genuine discussion at the conference about the options for
peace, though it must be said that the final peace treaty was never signed, and
the world had to be content with the summit diplomacy outlined above, where the
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Powers carved up the world between them. The second major change was the
establishment of the Security Council, with its veto power for the ‘Big Five’ (Britain,
China, France, the USA and the USSR), which was intended to make those
Powers act responsibly in the collective interest but also to give the UN real ‘teeth’
through ‘Chapter VI and VII’ binding sanctions and military action if necessary.
The problem was that the paralysis of the Security Council until 1990 made many
believe, with George Kennan, that the UN was a ‘vainglorious and pretentious asser-
tion of purpose … [that failed to address] … the real substance of international
affairs’ (Kennan, 1968/1972: 171–173). To be sure the UN has also generated
a huge number of ‘functional’ organizations, especially in the powerful ‘Bretton
Woods’ grouping (set up at the eponymous meeting of 1944) of the World Bank,
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International Monetary Fund and what is now (post-1995) the World Trade
Organization. But is that enough to prove the UN can protect or even affect the
world? The numerous efforts at reform of the system do not seem to have made
much impact (Taylor, 1993), though maybe it would also be true to say that the
UN mirrors the system in which it exists as a nominal sounding board and symbol
for an aspiration to fairness and order.
If there is any historical development that we can trace through the twentieth
century and until now, it might be said to be the move from the sovereignty of the
‘state’ to that of the ‘individual’. IOs have been the major vector of this change
of emphasis, while also showing up the limitations of such aspirational politics.
The nineteenth century left the legacy of seeing ‘freedom’ as being linked to the
idea of the ‘nation’, so when Woodrow Wilson talked of ‘self-determination’
he linked the idea that a people having their own state would necessarily lead
to democracy and the rule of law being extended to all citizens. He believed this to
be the case in the United States, though it clearly was not entirely so, as generations
of Soviet diplomats pointed out in the UN the repression of African Americans’
most basic rights for most of the period since 1776 (Sellars, 2002). The role of
the USA in pushing the human rights agenda in the UN has nonetheless been
of paramount importance, with a particular personal link to President Roosevelt’s
first lady, Eleanor, when she pursued that goal in a very impressive manner after
his death. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was in many ways her
personal triumph, though its contents have been discussed and variously attacked
or lauded ever since its signature in 1948 (Borgwardt, 2005).
The link between the individual and the state as guarantor of rights is explicitly
made in the Charter of the United Nations: ‘The right of self-determination … is an
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essential condition for the effective guarantee and observance of individual human
rights.’ It is seen essentially as preceding and guaranteeing all other rights. James
Mayall has written that in international law, even by 1990, ‘sovereignty is now said
to reside with the people, as an act of self-determination based on the will of the
majority’ (Mayall, 1990: 26–28). By the end of the Cold War the IOs were still living
out the fiction that individuals would always have their rights guaranteed by the
states they lived in. The central problematic today is that human rights are pre-
sumed by charter to be underpinned by states whereas in practice states are often
the worst abusers of those same rights (Forsythe, 2006). The UN came to play a
significant role in the internal affairs of states through election monitoring and
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even setting up the system of government itself in many countries, well before the
end of the Cold War (Bailey, 1994).
But in 1945 the Charter of the United Nations, signed at San Francisco, did for
the first time in an international treaty document clearly encourage and ‘reaffirm
faith in human rights…, it guaranteed fundamental freedoms for all without
distinction as to race, sex, language or religion’ (Article 13), and in Article 55 it
gave the UN the task of promoting these rights and freedoms. The problem
was that it gave very scant machinery, and until the establishment of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights in the 1990s (Ramcharan, 2002) the ‘Human
Rights Commission’, later upgraded to a ‘Centre’ in 1981, was largely unknown
and ineffectual, sandwiched as it was between the individual-centred Western
view of human rights and the social and economic focus of the (then) East Bloc
(Luard, 1982; Forsythe, 1985; Williams, 1988). This division was even cemented
in 1966, in the Covenants on civil and political rights on one side and those for
economic, social and cultural rights on the other (for a contemporary analysis, see
Robertson, 1972).
One of the key debates in IR since 1990 has centred on the idea and practice of
the ‘liberal peace’, especially through the use of what has come to be known as
‘humanitarian intervention’ (HI). This has now arrived at the point where the
General Assembly has accepted the findings of a thinktank, the International
Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, and adopted the principle
that there is a ‘Responsibility to Protect’ peoples within states where their own
governments are deemed to be repressing their human rights (for detailed studies
of this, see Wheeler, 2002; Bellamy, 2009). Insofar as this applies to the study of
IO, it is worth reflecting how historians might be said to have looked at this devel-
opment. Historians of the progress (or not) of human rights have tended to stress
the state-centric, even power, orientation of their origins in institutional form after
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mission civilisatrice. The second tradition springs from the same roots in the nine-
teenth century and carries the other impetus behind IO: that of creating order
and, hopefully, justice through the selective use of collective security or other
forms of organized force against those who would disturb international order. The
crucial period for the first testing of this dual impetus again is that of the period
between about 1918 and 1945. Throughout this period, and indeed beyond it, the
whole system of IO and postwar planning was geared to developing institutional
order-creating and -maintaining institutions, the most important of which was
that centred on the Security Council of the UN. We can see this impetus in the
‘reconstruction’ attempts of the LON (Williams, 2006) and, more importantly,
in the work of the first proper UN organization, UNRRA, set up officially in 1944.
The roots of UNRRA were in the State Department, organized by Roosevelt’s
close confidant Herbert Lehman, and closely modelled on New Deal ideas and
practices (Williams, 2006: chapter 4).
As we have seen, the Security Council was supposed to act as the ‘Four [or Five]
Policemen’ to stop threats to order. But when that same council was frozen into
inability to act by the Cold War, the order-building machinery was itself frozen. The
only possible compromise was ‘peacekeeping’, a compromise between collective
security and ‘fire-fighting’ developed by the Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold
in the 1950s (Diehl, 1994 is a good introduction, but see also James, 1990). As
shown by its first test (in the Suez Crisis of 1956), peacekeeping relied on the con-
sent of all forces in a given battle zone; the UN was not supposed to be ‘making’
peace and was not given the resources or the mandate to do so (Aulén,1969; Sheldon,
1987; Rikhye, 1984).
With the end of the Cold War, and the consequent ending of the routine use
of the veto on the Security Council by the USSR and/or the USA, a more robust
form of collective security was again possible. The concrete evidence of this came in
1991 with the first really universal Collective Security mission to expel Iraqi
forces from Kuwait, which had been occupied in August 1990. This operation saw
units from over a hundred countries and no vetoes being used in the Security
Council for the first time since Korea in 1950 – itself an aberration, as the USSR
had absented itself in protest against other US actions. The success of ‘Desert Storm’
in Kuwait both encouraged non-Security Council Permanent Five states that
the rule of international law would not be upheld by force if necessary, and also
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alarmed many of them when it became apparent that the success of 1991 might well
lead to intervention being used to uphold one or more Powers’ wishes for non-
security reasons, especially the abuse of human rights, as defined by the West (Taylor
and Groom, 2000).
The ‘HI agenda’ gets its main support from politicians’ thinktanks in the West
that favour a muscled liberal response to human rights abuses, and especially in the
USA and the UK, who are (ably helped mainly by Canada) engaged in a hard fight
in Iraq and Afghanistan. The question that many commentators have asked is
whether this is a new form of imperialism dressed up as HI. The links between the
American ‘neo-conservatives’ and supporters of HI has been noted in both the
UK and the USA (see notably – for the UK – the debate between Cooper, 2004
and Kampfner, 2004). In the USA writers like Noam Chomsky attack what they
see as US patterns of imperial design, or the influence of Central European
militant liberal philosophers like Leo Strauss (Norton, 2005). ‘Neo-conservative’
historians like Robert Kagan defend such actions as the defence of civilization itself
(Kagan, 2006b, 2008), while other Americans, often on the Republican Right,
attack such beliefs as hubristic and damaging to US national interest (Halper and
Clarke, 2004, 2007).
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European Union
Attempts to understand the emergence of the European Union also reflect some
of the trends in international history examined above. Mayne and Pinder, in their
Federal Union: The Pioneers (1990), argued that it was the great (and small) thinkers
that underpinned the elaboration of European ideas. This in turn was seen as
having sowed the true foundations of European unity, a view that was echoed in
collections such as that of Stirk (1989). Others, such as Milward, favoured a more
state-centric approach. In his Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945–51, Milward
(1984) argued that the nation-state in Europe was ‘saved’ by the process of eco-
nomic integration, and was in no way being ‘eroded’ by the process towards union.
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The process of European Union post-1945 was based on the self-interest of the
European states and permitted their survival. Milward further argued that other
explanations of European integration, such as Deutsch’s ‘community’ theory (1953),
have ‘not been studied in any systematic way’. Hence, ‘[i]f historical research into
the history of European integration is now to have its own proper agenda, including
its own theoretical hypotheses’, it should not reject earlier explanations, but neither,
implicitly, should it totally embrace them. Prominent among the earlier theorists
were the functionalists, who attributed European integration mainly to economic
and technocratic pressures, and the ‘idealists’, who saw human agency at the centre
of the process.
Some still look to a ‘Great Power’ explanation of European integration. Wallace
(1997) argued that theorists of integration ‘underplay the immense importance
of the American presence in shaping the structure of post-war Western Europe’,
citing wartime planning, the Marshall Plan and the generalized dependence on
the United States. ‘Western Europe was “America’s Europe” ’, he concluded. Perry
Anderson takes Milward’s and Wallace’s case further, suggesting that the influence
of Washington was crucial. Milward himself suggested that the ‘unpropitious’
origins of Europe were at least partly ‘the offspring of American disillusionment
with both the dangerous political disunity of the European continent and naive
progressivist optimism’. In the last part of that sentence, Milward dismissed much
of the thinking of the 1920s and 1930s, such as that of Coudenhove-Kalergi
(1948, though Pan-Europa was first published in German in 1923), and also much
of the political posturing on Europe of the interwar years captured, for example,
in the Briand Plan of the early 1930s. Keohane (1984), a political scientist, stressed
the need both for early leadership in creating any institutional framework and
for maintaining that leadership. Lundestad (1998a) went further, arguing, ‘The
United States promoted the integration of Western Europe, rather strongly until
the mid-1960s, [although] less strongly after that.’ He went as far as to argue that
the United States continued from 1945 to act as an ‘imperial’ power in Europe,
purely out of self-interest; the United States ‘did not pursue its pro-integrationist
policy primarily for the sake of Western Europeans.’ Its self-interest lay in avoiding
the need to intervene, for a third time in this century, to ‘prevent Europe from
being dominated by a hostile power’. Lundestad also argued that integration
was the cheapest option for the United States to protect its own security – cheapest
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in lives and in money. Lundestad left ‘empire’ in lower case and inverted
commas, and pointed to many elements of ‘predominance’: ‘Washington was able
to organize NATO, control the larger part of crucial Germany, keep the Comm-
unists out of power, include the region in the American-organized system of
freer trade, and gradually enhance the influence of American culture.’ Although
he immediately backtracked on his own term (i.e. ‘empire’), he still approvingly
quoted Maier, who wrote about the ‘analog of empire’, more Greek than
Roman.
CONCLUSION
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all power finds its way to direct itself into channels that are useful to the powerful.
If the UN does not prove ultimately useful to the Powers of today, it may well go
the same way as the LON. We must not be surprised if that proves to be the case.
But if history has one lesson on IO, it is that the next generation of such bodies
will be born out of a new, probably global, war.
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CHAPTER 7
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Identity
Concept, category and organizing principle
There are few concepts that have as many historical derivations and contemporary
definitions as identity. The purpose of this chapter is to familiarize international
history and international relations (IHIR) audiences with these definitions and
their origins. It does so by approaching identity in three ways. First, identity is
understood as a concept that signifies both sameness and difference. Second, identity
operates as an organizing category by which difference and similarity (usually in
cultural and political terms) group people into social collectives. Third, identity
functions as a legitimating principle that both motivates and justifies individual
and group demands for a range of self-determination and recognition: political,
economic, class, gender, ethnicity or religious-based, etc. Or, as Rogers Brubaker
suggests, identities are ‘at once categories of social and political practice and catego-
ries of social and political analysis’ (Brubaker, 2004: 31).
Identity refers to the attributes or qualities by which an entity is recognized.
What is difficult is that ‘entities’ – meaning actors, groups, people, states, nations –
are themselves recognized in two ways, first by virtue of what makes them a group,
principally by what they have in common between themselves that allows them
to be identified as a group, and second, by what this group has that differentiates
it from other groups, the unique attributes that are not shared by others. Identity is
thus a paradoxical combination of an entity’s unique qualities and qualities shared
with other entities (including the very possession of an identity). Identity renders an
actor at once both unlike and alike, to all other actors.
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manifest themselves in dramatically different ways, even across groups that appear
largely alike in historical, political and even cultural composition.
Identity invites both the historian and the IR theorist to separate neatly civic
from cultural, state from national, instrumental interests and ensuing international
behaviour from domestic perceptions and cultural attitudes. But identity is rarely
so simple. Virtually every facet of what constitutes an individual is reproduced writ
large at the collective level and deployed at the international level; self-identification
and the associated processes of defining oneself as a group and defending one’s
values and interests in the form of a definable political entity defies almost any logic
apart from the apparent triad of identity–interests–policy (and not necessarily in
that order). Equally, identity as a method of identifying with these same groups
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ubiquitous force of all; analyses that fail to take account of it are visibly diminished.
As an organizing principle, identity applies enduringly to individuals, groups, states
and even the system of states. As a category, identity classifies polities culturally
and politically, economically and socially; it differentiates between the content of
the nation and the form of the state, and between the internal body politic, the nature
of its borders and the external quality of outsiders. Finally, as a concept, identity
explains individual motivation, group choices and state behaviour. As an organizing
principle, identity is therefore surprisingly flexible, serving multiple ends, and
derived from multiple disciplines.
For international history, identity charts the rise of instrumental obligation
and cultural allegiance that underwrite the growth of societies and states. For IR,
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the state identifies both with the state and (more visibly) with each other on the basis
of a shared interpretation of key events and experiences, as detailed in Box 7.1.
Taken together, origins, watershed moments and the challenges of dealing with
change and rejecting change help to construct groups, and over time animate their
interests in cultural and political forms. For historians, identity operates in two key
ways. First, in a long-term and passive method, identity provides broad storylines of
the national self, the national ‘us’, storylines which provide linear shape to the sub-
stance of national history, allowing it to have an effective beginning, a series of rises
and falls and, in some cases, an end. Second, identity operates in a short-term and
dynamic method via a series of snapshots: key moments in history that convey in
abbreviated fashion the quintessence of the national identity.
The storyline operates by providing a long-term structure in which detailed
narratives of national society is layered; it provides the foundation for national
history as a repository of key national characteristics, which is used to educate
younger generations and frequently to assimilate non-nationals. Snapshots provide
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populace and policymakers alike with ‘off the shelf ’ templates in which the national
identity has been drawn on in a given situation, national interests derived, and
fundaments of public and foreign policy constituted and enacted. National history
and national identity are in fact so overlapping that the history of a nation-state
is effectively the storyline of the national ‘self ’, permeated over time by challenges
and successes. The state’s composition, and the content of its policies, are largely
products of past decisions, structures, trends, attitudes; so much so that breaking
with them takes considerable effort, and justification. Indeed, breaking with past
history generally implies distancing oneself from the very ‘self ’ of the nation.
IR scholars therefore need to make use of identity as a key feature of history
by grasping a few key nuances. First, the difference between a broad historical
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awareness of the past (as a repository) and the selectivity of the past embodied in
social memory, in which national history helps policymakers made expedient use
of national historical identity in service of political ends. IR scholars need to distin-
guish between written accounts of national histories providing a given perspective
of national identity, versus the selective use of national storylines in the service
of a political goal. Written accounts of national identity provide us with the passive
foundation; this foundation becomes animated as social memory when key aspects
are extracted to create or sustain a given policy (including the manufacturing
of another identity or narrative). Thus, accounts of identity as derived from history
are quite separate from the process by which identity catalyses collective cohesion
and subsequent action.
• The use of ethnicity and ‘Otherness’ in the Egyptian imperial conquest of their
chief rival, Nubia. Here, ethnicity is a surprisingly mobile and permeable mode,
challenging its later essentialist interpretations.
• As explored by Herodotus, Euripides and Strabo, various Athenian rituals like
that of Artemis Tauropolos, in which a series of polarities were established to
demonstrate a coming of age for groups of individuals: childhood vs adulthood,
animal vs human, territorial heartland vs the periphery of Empire, and barbarian
ethnicity vs Greek norms.
• The role of Roman civitas (community) vs the non-Roman natio (peoples/
races) of the Empire, including well-known examples in Gaul and Britain,
and lesser-known instances of the Jewish Diaspora, and the role of a non-ethnic,
a-territorial identity, including the role of social networks and the vehicle of
religion to promote an identity.
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Engaging with these and others, one can quickly grasp the sheer number of actors
to whom identity is attributed, and by whom identity is conferred. From the
European perspective, Classical Greek, biblical and Roman sources provide the
readiest examples. Indeed, ancient Greece and its contemporary civilizations
had units that operated in an ascending range: the citizen, the family, the city, the
country, the empire. Each of these bequeaths terms that are familiar today.
Most central was the city, the focus of commerce, worship and loyalty, worthy of
the supreme sacrifice. This focus was subsequently widened by Greeks in the
postclassical period. Both Cynics and Stoics are representative of a cosmopolitan
world in which cities and municipal identities gradually lost their political indepen-
dence, and where individuals began to conceive of themselves as citizens of the
world, identifying not with local forms of self like cities and local regions, but with
broader political, economic and social forces linking them as humans.
Moving into the Roman era, St Paul gives a good early example of the sheer
complexity of identity that had sprung up around the concept of citizenship, and
the form of political protection that this implied:
“I myself am a Jew,” Paul went on. “I was born in Tarsus in Cilicia, but I was
brought up here in the city, I received my training at the feet of Gamaliel and
I was schooled in the strictest observance of our father’s Law …” 22:23–25 –
As they were yelling and ripping their clothes and hurling dust into the air,
the colonel gave orders to bring Paul into the barracks and directed that he
should be examined by scourging, so that he might discover the reason for
such an uproar against him. But when they had strapped him up, Paul spoke
to the centurion standing by, “Is it legal for you to flog a man who is a Roman
citizen, and untried at that?” 22:26 – On hearing this the centurion went in
to the colonel and reported to him, saying, “Do you realise what you were
about to do? This man is a Roman citizen!” 22:27 – Then the colonel himself
came up to Paul, and said, “Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?” And he said,
“Yes.” 22:28 – Whereupon the colonel replied, “It cost me a good deal to get my
citizenship.” “Ah,” replied Paul, “but I was born a citizen.” 22:29 – Then those
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who had been about to examine him left hurriedly, while even the colonel himself
was alarmed at discovering that Paul was a Roman and that he had had him
bound.
(Acts of the Apostles, 22:3–29)
Roman references to identity stem from two Latin terms natio and civitas, mean-
ing birth/nation/people and community respectively. The structure of Roman law
provides a context in which natio can refer to any group of people, or when con-
trasted against civitas, an inferior or marginalized race of people, as demonstrated
in Cicero’s Philippics Against Mark Antony:
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With the rise of Christianity and the Respublica Christiana, Christianity switched
from being the ‘other’ to the Roman ‘self ’, to the chief ‘Self ’ juxtaposed to non-
Christian others. A parallel development to Christianity (as a rather transcendent
‘self ’) was the rise of specific territorial units with which people readily identified,
from city-states to kingdoms or towns, and the growth of area-specific languages
by which to increase the sense of ‘groupness’ across a large number of people. The
idea of ‘nation’ as a combination of land and linguistic-based identity is well expressed
by Liutprand, the Bishop of Cremona in 968; rebuffing the ambitions of the
Holy Roman Emperor, the Bishop declared that
The land … which you say belongs to your empire belongs, as the nationality and
language of the people proves, to the kingdom of Italy.
(http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/20A/Luitprand.html, accessed June 2011)
However, a nation did not necessarily rely on land and language. By the twelfth
century, the term was used in reference to community of learning, as demonstrated
by the use of natio to describe the group of students at the University of Paris.
However, what bound these students as a group was their land of birth, their
common language, and a common body of law. Students could be divided thus into
French, Saxon and Bavarian nations. Other medieval views of identity were wonder-
fully complex, because they were derived from the myriad forms of political organi-
zation that existed in Europe between the twelfth century and the standardizing
tendencies inherent in the Peace of Westphalia (1648). As made clear in Chapter 4,
various types of political authorities vied with each other over the constitution and
application of sovereignty in terms of both authority and power. This produced a
whole range of sacred and secular polities, from the Holy Roman Empire and the
Papacy as imperial examples, to assorted kingdoms, duchies, principalities, free and
cathedral cities, towns, guilds and charters. Each of these existed as a self-contained
unit capable of conferring a measure of strategic protection and cultural affiliation
on its members in a way that produced a host of discrete Selves drawn frequently in
opposition to the claims of Others.
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a location and a longing; or as Viroli argues, ‘the patria is both a mode of life and
a culture, it is a particular mode of life and a culture which is based on the values
of liberty and civil equality’, a location and a way of life that promotes the unique-
ness of that location (in Xenos, 1996: 219).
Enlightenment views were similarly supportive of the cosmopolitan perspective,
advocating a universalist, humanist ethos, rather than a particularist or individualist
one. Political frontiers were the exercise and outcome of rulers, not the ruled;
they were instrumental for the sovereign state but not substantive in constructing
an accompanying political identity. Enlightenment cosmopolites viewed political
identity as distinctly at odds with their universalist ethos; believing instead that
‘identity is a matter of language, literature, folkways, and, in a broad sense, culture,
without necessarily carrying political weight’ (Brown, 2001: 120).
The key ‘Early Modern’ development (covering the sixteenth to the eighteenth
centuries) is the transformation of territorial states from loose amalgams of authority
and populace to the chief vehicle for territory-based authority, resource-based power
and collective identities. This period saw the gradual replacement of dynastic or
absolutist kingdoms and empires first by ‘national’ monarchies and then by consti-
tutional republican states. These changes arose from two parallel drivers: an institu-
tional shift in understanding sovereignty as the new benchmark for all claims
of authority, and a sociological shift in transitioning from local (familial, kin-based,
municipal) forms of allegiance to far wider forms of identification, i.e. a national
group within the territorial bounds of the sovereign state, and additionally, on the
cultural grounds of the group’s particular uniqueness. The ‘Late Modern’ develop-
ment (nineteenth and twentieth centuries) saw developing state-based entities
transformed once again into a standardized sovereign unit complete with political
and legal attributes; national identity functioned both to confirm the cultural and
social legitimacy of settled states as an appropriate collective unit, or a method by
which to demand a state, on the basis of self-determination.
LIBERAL PERSPECTIVES
Rarely cited, John Locke’s ‘theory of mind’ is arguably the progenitor of modern
identity theory, and the philosophical basis for political and sociological processes of
group identity. Simply put, Locke (generally referred to as an empiricist in his style
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of thought) was the first philosopher to define the idea of the ‘self ’ through the
process of consciousness. Beginning from first principles, in which the human mind
is to begin with a tabula rasa (blank slate), Locke rejected the previous school
of Cartesian philosophy, which was based on the premise that humans innately
know key ideas and logical precepts, and argued instead that ideas derive solely
from our various external experiences and are not inbuilt or innate. Human ideas
can thus originate only from two sources: sensory and reflective. Locke’s ‘self ’ is thus
entirely conscious: both self-aware and self-reflective, which he defines as:
Locke’s three chief works deal with some aspect of human or collective identity
(An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690), as well as education (Some
Thoughts Concerning Education, 1693) and government (Two Treatises of Government,
1689/1764). Particularly crucial for ensuing understandings of how identity
actually operates is Locke’s argument that identity is explicit and not latent if it is
to operate as an organizing principle for a group. Groups are self-defining entities
and this process can only occur with genuine self-awareness and progressive self-
reflexivity. Locke thus pinpointed a truism about identity that only crystallized into
workable analysis three hundred years later. As Walker Connor explains, ‘many of
the problems associated with defining a group are attributable precisely to the fact
that it is a self-defining group. That is why scholars … have consistently used terms
such as self-awareness and self-consciousness when analysing and describing the
nation’ (1994: 104).
In addition, Locke makes three observations critical to understanding the role
of identity in defining the individuality and behaviour of individuals and groups.
First, the use of sense and reflection (in early years, via education) to build up an
association of ideas upon which a person’s sense of self is first based. Second,
this process of associationism (which had an enduring impact on contemporary
psychology, educational theory) operates collectively, endowing a given group with
key ideas about who they are in and of themselves, and who they are relative to
others (the Self/Other dichotomy). Third, as the main content of human ideas
is balanced roughly between reason and tolerance on the one hand, and the desire
for selfish gains on the other, the optimum method by which individuals should
flourish politically is in a state that is contractually organized between a ruler and
the ruled. The rights of people to pursue their authentic human nature is captured
in brief phrase that has since become immortalized in the US Constitution, namely
that all have the right to ‘Life, health, Liberty, or Possessions’ (Locke, 1689/1764:
164). The optimum method to support these rights was in the structure of a state
in which both the particularist forces of a given society could flourish (civil society)
and the accompanying legal and political requirements could be addressed by a state
government. Locke therefore represents something of a watershed in identifying
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both the sovereign rights of man, and the structure most likely to promote these
rights in defence of the individual and group ‘Self ’.
Locke, along with Kant and Rousseau, represented the liberal tradition of a
contractarian view of society that challenged older, absolutist, top-down methods of
enforcing rule on the ruled. Instead, their view was of a broad social identity,
grounded by a conceptual contract between the ruler and ruled; operating in every
state unit, the people themselves thus had a great deal in common as to what held
them together as subjects, citizens, etc. Based on his perspectives of autonomy and
freedom, Kant clarified these ideas further in his writings on self-determination.
Freedom for Kant is the claim laid by individuals and groups to be free from undue
external influence, both physical and metaphysical. Freedom is promoted by the
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ability to adhere to a moral code (or law), rather than being forced to live, work
or think in a way that runs counter to one’s authentic nature. Thus, the state
of being free is one of autonomy: freedom from external constraint as a result
of ‘giving the law to oneself ’ (Kant, 1993: 44). At the collective level, this suggests
that a given group could lay claim to this form of autonomy; enabling them to both
label external influence over them as unnatural to their authentic existence and
demand the opportunity to give the law to themselves within their own community
of governance. The Kantian argument for self-determination can be derived from
the following observation:
If the will seeks the law that is to determine it anywhere but in the fitness of its
maxims for its own legislation of universal laws, and if it thus goes outside of
itself and seeks this law in the character of any of its objects, then heteronomy
[being beholden to outside influences] always results.
(Kant, 1993: 45)
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and a cultural tool in the service of the nation. The French Revolution exemplifies
the increasing potency of identity to serve political needs, while German romanti-
cism views popular sovereignty as serving cultural needs. The result is two visible
types of identity: one political, buttressing the creation of a civic state; and one
cultural, fashioning and articulating the nation.
The method by which the French state decides upon its sovereignty has knock-
on effects for its identity. As decided by the French Constitution of 1791, sover-
eignty was first a national issue, decided upon by Parliament, which represented
only a small portion of enfranchised citizens. The 1793 Constitution, however,
transformed sovereignty into a popular issue, on the basis of wider enfranchisement
and more direct forms of democratic representation. National sovereignty was
representative of the people – a civic form in which the people were identified
with at a distance, by people on their behalf. Popular sovereignty was a manifesta-
tion of claims to authority made by the people – a civic form that rested on a
broader interpretation of their identity as citizens of the French nation, operating
in a way that overlapped civic objectives with cultural ones. Emmanuel Joseph
or ‘Abbot’ Sieyès, a theorist and pamphleteer of the French Revolution, was one
of the first architects of this distinction. Suggesting that nations sequentially pre-
ceded states, Sieyès defined a nation as a subject of natural (rather than manmade)
law, a body of people that existed before the creation of the political state as an
objective sovereign entity (Sewell Jr, 1994: 9). The people were the national inhabit-
ants of the subsequently formed sovereign state, contractually instituted on the basis
of a constitution. The state lays claim to sovereignty; its people in turn lay claim to
themselves as a nation and, as such, identify with their state.
CULTURAL NATIONS
There are a number of different interpretations of the role of cultural identity in
either constructing or receiving the nation. Robust interpretations suggest that a
visible ethnic component comprises the core of a nation and provides a clear, immu-
table sense of identity strongly disposed to constructing itself in opposition to any
series of others. This identity is dedicated to preserving its cultural particularism
without necessarily resorting to the use of a state structure. Weaker interpretations
suggest that, even if the state is successfully established subsequent to a nation, there
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will always remain some requirement for a national society to consider itself separate
and unique from others, on the basis of its history, its achievements and failures, its
symbols, its interests, ethics and principles.
Are there genuine cultural nations? Again, it depends on the criteria. If culture
is being used as a method to justify group coherence rather than group difference,
then culture is simply one of a number of attributes by which a national community
identifies itself relative to others. This is quite common in most contemporary
nation-states. However, there are groupings who even now do possess a discernible
ethnic core and/or a potent national narrative regarding their common ancestry,
be it familial, territorial, temporal or as a result of constant external forces. The sense
of shared past origin produces a shared common destiny, and generally is accompa-
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nied by visible homogeneity in both its cultural and civic elements. The sense of
being an ingroup can be further reinforced through language, religion, ethical and
ideological heritage, amicable or hostile relationships with immediate neighbours,
and success or failure in pursuing their political aims.
The cultural nation is from this perspective an originator. However, it is also
a reactive force, as best evidenced by the zeal for cultural nations that swept Europe
and America in reaction to Napoleon’s usurpations of the founding principles of
the French Revolution. Rejecting the uniquely civic principles of liberty, equality
and brotherhood, true national groupings were deemed to require more essentialist,
more authentic roots in order to withstand the forces of modernity and the impact
of foreign conquest: the nation should not merely be defensible, but devotional,
a source of idealized, even romanticized allegiance and loyalty. German romantic
nationalists like Herder followed precisely this line, rejecting civicism and rational-
ism in the form of progress and even equality in favour of heritage and history.
Liberal principles of equality as espoused by the American and French revolutions
were rejected on the basis that – in quantitative terms – they represented merely
the aggregate of the rights of all its citizens, and no more. This was, in the view of
German nationalists, entirely unrepresentative of both the transcendent quality of
the nation and the particularist traits of its people. A qualitative view of the identity
of a nation, rather than state, based on the sum of their claims, produced a far more
potent understanding of the specific characteristics of the people (or Volk), mani-
fested in their overall cultural spirit (Volkgeist), as argued by Herder. The nation,
in this way, was greater than the sum of its parts, an objective, organic entity rather
than a series of subjective group desires. Cultural perspectives of national identity
thus represent a distinct challenge to eighteenth-century liberalism and provided
fuel for much nineteenth-century theorizing on nationalism. This eventually
produced a neat division between the idea of Herder’s ‘cultural nation’ (Kulturnation),
and Hegel’s Staatsnation, which transferred the cultural requirements of a national
community into the state unit. Another key theme from this period was that of
communication, as evidenced by the writings of Max Weber.
While much in the cultural school appears compelling, it is generally unconvinc-
ing. Herder and Hegel’s qualities of a common language, common territory
and common economic and cultural life representing a transhistorical Geist are
largely improbable fictions that occur in only a minority of cases. Both historical
and contemporary nation-states have rarely been repositories of a single language;
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there are dozens of examples of states with two or more official languages, and
equally, where a major lingua franca, like English, Spanish or Arabic encompasses a
whole range of given political identities far beyond a given state. Languages are an
effective vehicle for national identity only because they are first, and consciously
‘elevated to the symbol of the nation’ (Connor, 1994: 44). Equally, common terri-
tory is an unlikely category. Many irredentist national limits frequently spill over
and beyond state borders, while many state borders stop short of perceived national
frontiers, and many states are multi-territorial in being spread across a variety of
geographic features (e.g. archipelagos). Territory is also an unhelpful marker of iden-
tity for the landless, like diasporas or migrants or the permanently displaced. More
frequently, territory denotes an unattainable quality of otherness, rather than a set-
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tled place for a national self (Said, 1979). In this respect, territory – like language –
is ‘more a symbolic means of mobilization than essential to nationhood’ (Reicher
and Hopkins, 2001: 10). Common economic and national characters are still less
convincing. The former had virtually disappeared with the rise of economic interde-
pendence between states and commercial entities and the sheer scope and scale
of globalization. National characteristics are without question an abiding form
of self-reference, but they are selectively chosen by both public and politician
alike, and reflect generational, regional, social, economic and psychological biases
in their retelling, and as such exist as a convenient but arguably abbreviated method
of encapsulating the social mores and cultural codes advocated as reflective of a
majority.
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The ‘genesis’ school emerged from the work done by Hans Kohn (The Idea of
Nationalism, 1945) and Carlton (The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism,
1931) immediately after World War II, based on the major forces of nationalism
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that had produced both of the previous world wars. Kohn and Carlton were pio-
neers who established the central tenets of the modernist position and, in so doing,
laid the conceptual perimeters for the next fifty years of academic enquiry about
nationalism and identity. Kohn set the stage by distinguishing between Western
and Eastern nationalism. Western nationalism was understood to originate in
popular sovereignty movements of the English Civil War and the French Revolution
in a process whereby the population identifies itself en masse as a nation, and
then subsequently with an existing political structure. For Kohn, this sequence
‘serves as the justificatory foundation of the modern state in an age when the
political and cultural integration of the entire population is assumed’ (Xenos, 1996:
213). Eastern nationalism occurs less evenly as a force that precedes the state,
but which constructs it only to further cultural rather than political forms of repre-
sentation. Thus, as Kohn argues,
in Central and Eastern Europe and in Asia, nationalism arose not only
later, but also generally at a more backward stage of social and political
development: the frontiers of an existing state and of a rising nationality
rarely coincided; nationalism, there, grew in protest against and in conflict
with the existing state pattern – not primarily to transform it into a people’s
state, but to redraw the political boundaries in conformity with ethnographic
demands.
(Kohn, 1945: 329)
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The second or ‘modernist’ school emerged during the 1950s and 1960s based on
the work of three key scholars: Ernest Gellner (Nations and Nationalism, 1983),
Elie Kedourie (Nationalism, 1960) and Karl Deutsch (Nationalism and Social
Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality, 1953). This school
has in common that its scholars approached identity as a moving process built
up over time, challenged and constructed by individuals and groups, and used in
the conscious service of contemporary state-building. Each of these three authors
makes this same point from a different angle.
Gellner argues that a swiftly industrializing Europe effectively required two
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To unmask the processes which have led to the saliency of culture as the universal
socio-political organiser. The modernists’ objective is to understand why and
when the fact of belonging to a nation, or any culturally defined homogenous
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community, became felt as an imperative and conceived as the only ‘natural’ sup-
port of one’s own socio-political identity.
(Jacquin-Berdal, in Vandersluis, 2000: 53)
The key point, then, is to ask what key factors actually bring about the nation.
For the purposes of this chapter, IR scholars need to ask the following questions
of the modernist school: What role does identity play at individual and collective
level in forming both cultural and political senses of self? What are the implica-
tions for the particular sequence in which this takes place (i.e. nation to state, or
state to nation)? and How does identity affect the ability of the resulting state to
generate both a national history and a set of core behaviours in which identity plays
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a key role?
Modernists acknowledge the role of culture, and the driving force of language in
prompting group consciousness, but they argue that groups still require an admin-
istrative structure to provide the political form that can internally contain and exter-
nally realize such cultural content. The administrative unit most likely to be chosen
for cultural reasons and political ends is, of course, the state. The question is whether
the state is a force for good or ill as regards the ultimate ends of nationalists. Is
the state is a vehicle for the preservation and expansion of national consciousness?
Or is the state a more insidious unit, turning the power of cultural self-identification
to its own ends, subverting the original and authentic dynamics of a given identity,
binding it artificially within geographical areas that are ill suited to the territorial
origins of its people, and eroding its uniquely particularist content through practices
of standardization in order to fit the generic mould of other sovereign states?
The modernist response is that the majority of national identifiers (territory,
history, national symbols, etc.), as well as the national majorities and minorities,
require and generally thrive within the standard state unit. Assuming the state
has the minimum sovereign requirements of set borders, identifiable populace,
a centralized and viable (though not necessarily representative) government, and
external equality afforded by recognition, it can both protect the unique qualities
of its national culture and promote the cause of the national identity in the form
of the national interest and subsequent policy decisions. Paradoxically, the
specificity of the nation – as both distinct from, and identical to, all other social
groupings – can only be fully realized in the standardized unit of the state. While
the particular blend of nation and state differs tremendously, even within the
relatively small geographic area of Western Europe, the outcome, however uneven
and even artificial, for both historians, political theorists and IR theorists, is the
contemporary nation-state.
The third or ‘primordialist’ school challenged directly the precepts of the modernist
school; arguing that the true nature of identity was far older, far more intangible
and complex and its use less readily available to actors. Boosted by the wave of post-
colonial independence movements sweeping across the Third World in the 1970s,
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scholars like Walker Connor (Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding, 1994)
and ethno-nationalists like Anthony Smith (The Ethnic Revival, 1981, and The
Ethnic Origins of Nations, 1986) argued that, in ignoring the role of ethnic identity,
the modernist school had missed a fundamental element driving the complex rela-
tion between individuals and societies, and between nations and states. Connor,
Smith and others argued this failure to appreciate ethnicity meant that modernist
theories of nationalism ‘underrated the emotional appeal of nationalism and were
thus unable to foresee and explain its re-emergence’ (Jacquin-Berdal, 2000: 52).
Primordialists base their view of the nation on the assumption of a pre-existing,
timeless and generally immutable group, lodged homogenously and permanently in
one geographical location. The attributes of a pre-existing, generally homogenous
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group, with an inherently immutable identity in the face of change, forms the
core view of the primordialist school. Generally, identity is immutable because it is
ethnic. Identity – at individual or collective level – simply cannot be fashioned as
one would fashion and then don a suit. One neither receives identity as a reflection
of the modern era, nor uses it in instrumental fashion. Its fabric consists of threads
that bind one inherently, irrevocably, undeniably, to one’s past. In primordialism,
identity fashions people; it is not fashioned by people. This is not only the true form
of identity-building, but the ‘true nationalism’ by which the majority of national
societies are themselves fashioned.
Nations are not – contrary to Gellner – mere inventions; accordingly, national
identity is not – contrary to Eric Hobsbawm – the invention of tradition in the
service of political pragmatism. Nations are not only authentic in terms of their
culture, but valid representations of the political will of their national society.
While the modernist school contends that the state and the nation are ‘invented,
imagined, constructed, or fabricated’, the centrality of ethnicity as the prime mode
of determining the indivisibility of a national identity demonstrates for these
scholars ‘that nations are not artificial creations, that they are in fact grounded in
genuine cultural communities which pre-date the era of nationalism’ (Jacquin-
Berdal, 2000: 52).
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identity, but they are only a first step on a more complicated journey regarding
the use of tangible and intangible forces in pursuance of group goals. This explains
why people who do not share all the attributes understood to be specifically ‘national’
can still feel as if they belong to a group (and vice versa). Simply put, if people
believe in the power of these attributes to the extent that they impact on their behav-
iour, then identity has a causal effect independent of the concepts and categories
that make it up.
That being said, historians are correct to point out that the most potent core
of either cultural or political forms of identity is the use of a national history
(however questionable its accuracy) in providing explanations for how a national
community first came together. At the heart of the national narrative one usually
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finds reference to essentialist qualities that the group alone holds in common, includ-
ing a shared origin, and a sense of common ancestry. Again, however, shared
origins need only be intersubjectively shared to have as potent an effect as groups
who share a genuinely ethnic connection. Equally, political theorists are correct in
identifying symbols or strategies by which a group’s identity translates into princi-
ples of order, values that produce specific interests, and interests which promote
particular behaviour. These behavioural outcomes can be civic in producing admin-
istrative structures, or cultural in preserving a particular attribute, narrative or aspect
of heritage. When the constitutive force of history combines with the causal impact
of group order, the outcome is a group whose cultural particularisms generally
obtain as political interests in the form of the sovereign state and, through the pro-
cess, policy-based behaviour. The outcome may contain elements of a political
nation and/or a cultural nation, but it is in sum a ‘Willensnation’, a ‘nation by sheer
will’.
Perhaps because these oppositions are so uncomfortable, the majority of IR
theory tends not to engage with the detailed descriptions of the cultural, social
and political background of the state and its national derivations, preferring instead
the catch-all sobriquet of nation-state. This has the benefit of including both the
ethnic/cultural/symbolic aspects of national consciousness that drive a people to feel
themselves to be a group and the civic/political/strategic aspects of administrative
and sovereign facets by which a people can legitimate governing themselves as a
group. There are some considerable drawbacks. The main drawback depends upon
one’s disciplinary inclination; IR scholars are generally so used to dealing with states
that the nation itself tends to be ignored, along with endogenous dynamics that are
visibly – if unevenly – responsible for internal and external behaviour. Historians,
particularly those focusing on nationalism, tend to ignore the administrative milieu
and take the state itself for granted.
The final stage of identity is still occurring. It is a time of dislocation, rupture,
disjuncture, in which old loyalties have been thrown into question, familiar symbols
changed or eroded, and new forms of authority raised. Transnational organizations,
economic interdependence, epistemic communities and even virtual entities all
crowd around the older Westphalian unit, challenging the original state-based
method of cultural expressions through political forms. But yet states last. They
are undeniably enduring precisely because they confer identity, order and authority,
and they do so in terms of spatial and temporal markers: the most basic tools for
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IDENTITY
constructing identity. For Chris Brown, ‘it is highly unlikely that, for most of the
world’s inhabitants, [these new forms] will be able to act as more than supplemen-
tary backups for the more traditional identity-conferring territorial units’ (2001:
134). Contemporary theorists of nationalism now engage with both modernist
viewpoints and the primordialist camp. As Salam observes, the result of both is
that
Whereas the nation was once looked upon as an unproblematic and transhistori-
cal phenomenon … this new scholarship … is defined by a common acceptance
of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, a collectivity based on shared histori-
cal memories and cultural experiences, not blood or soil … National identity
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does not reflect [solely] a prior, primordial collective self; rather it is part of a fluid
network of representations distinguished by its privileged place – one owed to the
primacy of the territorial, sovereign nation-state.
(Abdel Salam, 2001: 307)
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IDENTITY
market and external policy can be included. There is implicit acceptance but ironi-
cally little real knowledge of the guiding norms of the EU, including democracy,
human rights, rule of law, as well as neoliberal principles of economic governance,
and more contemporary practical norms including environmental protection and
crisis management.
195
IDENTITY
nation and state units, and are in turn constituted by these units directly
connects to the construction of the state, the choice of its national interests, and the
motivation and orientation of its foreign policy.
What explains such difficulties? Simply put, IR suffers from the same problems
as IH and indeed every other discipline within the social sciences and humanities
that has attempted to deal with identity: there are too many understandings of it
on offer. Ironically, the definitional virility of identity initially produced a degree
of analytical impotence within IR that lasted (with a few exceptions) until immedi-
ately after the Cold War. Due to this wide spectrum of understanding and usage,
a brief overview of how identity connects with each of the major schools of thought
within IR is therefore in order.
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Identity for realists, for example, is an existent but rather uninteresting form
of sociopolitical force by which a given populace engages with, and is in turn
engaged by, forms of civic allegiance at municipal, regional and national levels.
Their engagement is purely instrumental, i.e. allegiance to a given state and govern-
ment supports the majority of their individual and collective interests, allowing
specific governments to direct and deploy the means of a reliable workforce for
the political, economic or territorial ends of the state. Identity is visible across
all states at the domestic level in the form of citizenship, and visible between
states in the form of sovereignty, as the generic status accorded exclusively to states
by states. Because realists view states as unified and cohesive entities, their perspec-
tive of identity is as a generic force by which society inheres to a territory. They
may draw upon historical and cultural modes of belonging to deepen this
inherence, but the primary form of identification is a functional one and indicates
merely that people inhere to political units in similar ways, for similar reasons.
At the external level, such processes also explain why states themselves (alike in
their internal compositions) behave similarly or, in IR terms, are functionally
non-differentiated.
Liberal views are agreeably wider and countenance not only broader types of
civic identity on the basis of class, modes of industry and methods of governing
a people, but recognize that exogenous forms of self-recognition yield clearer ideas
of humanism, idealism and varieties of commercial interchange. The liberal empha-
sis on the individual suggests that identities are not received or instrumental,
but largely unique to a given group. Differences between people in the form of cul-
ture are of value in themselves, and to be respected. Conversely, the liberal emphasis
on the universal qualities shared by all human beings suggests that people of every
nation – despite their cultural differences – effectively share the same status and
are entitled to the same rights (best exemplified in the doctrine of human rights).
The paradox of identity as a mode of dissimilarity and similarity is most clearly
seen within liberalism as a combination of unique forms of individuation and
universal modes of treatment. Liberalism is thus torn between acknowledging
the core facets of human identity as ultimately cosmopolitan in nature, and the
distinguishing features by which that identity is made known to others: in national,
social, gendered, ethnic and religious differences.
Within IR, the realist–liberal split over political affiliation and ensuring forms
of allegiance, responsibility and even identity reached something of a zenith in
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IDENTITY
From a liberal perspective, the only true and foundational identity we possess
derives from our common membership in the human race… We might well
possess, by chance or choice, a series of other identities … but these are essentially
secondary. The fact that they are secondary does not mean they are unimportant
… so long as our primary identity as sharers of a common humanity is not
compromised thereby.
(Brown, 2001: 127–128)
Humans are classified primarily by what they most share in common, not by
arbitrary methods of difference based on income, ethnicity or territory. The
community in which humans live and grow is equally arbitrary; the state and its
borders are a random series of structures to group people; they are not symbols by
which people necessarily desire to be grouped or identified. Borders are not identify-
ing devices either – as instrumentalist features, they do not drive identity formation.
People construct themselves based on their humanity, and only subsequently
on their surroundings; they are not made by such surroundings, because they are
fundamentally contingent.
As a critical view of liberalism, Marxism suggests that the key unifying factor
for all humans is their economic position as a result of their placement within the
industrial order, and the social class to which they belong in consequence. Other
identities like nationality, religion or ethnicity may tie, but ultimately do not bind.
However, as manifestations of the unequal capitalist system, even class identities
are regarded by Marxism as transitional rather than primordial, and would falter
in the face of a reconstructed, identity-free communist system.
For approaches derived from realist theory support a particularist, communitar-
ian perspective, the state, and its borders are of paramount importance, containing
within in it a unique, self-contained community. From this view, identifying
with others solely on the basis of a generic human identity is unrealistic because
we are disposed to categorize people into groups on the basis of their inherent
difference. And it is unsustainable simply because humans are inevitably the specific
product of a particular culture. Winnowing out the precise aspect of humanity
foundational to the panoply of other identities is an impossible task simply because
197
IDENTITY
our specific cultural and social identity overwhelmingly shapes and contains
our broader human identity. Operating on the basis of human identity is too
broad, too unworkable, too neutral; too close indeed to being without an identity.
An identity, after all, is way of articulating a given characteristic, using specific signi-
fiers to identify people based on their attributes. Humanity is too non-specific a
signifier.
There are four consequences to the communitarian perspective. First, symbols
and forces derived from our local community take on particular potency – in our
ability to recognize, identify and defend them, we attach to them and them to us.
Second, the process of constituting ourselves on the particularist is inevitably
political – it serves our ends in a way that may originate in culture, but ultimately
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198
IDENTITY
The next paradigm within IR treats identity less as a troublesome definition (qua
realism) or a helpful if troubling organizing category (qua liberalism). Constructivism
grapples more effectively with identity as a concept describing both material and
intangible forces by which political and social realities are constructed. Despite
groundwork by sociologists like Berger and Luckmann laid in the late 1960s, a
new ontology emerged with real force within IR only when the end of the Cold
War finally broke the seemingly inexorable grip of realism and neo-realism as
a method of analysis of state interest and behaviour. States became reclassified as
agents, operating on behalf of the needs and identities of the collectives that inhabit
them, and recast as agents both located in, and fundamentally part of, the interna-
tional structure (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). Agents, either individuals or states,
literally create their social environment, which in turn takes on objective reality of
its own. Within this constructed social reality, agents are first socialized into, and
then gradually internalize, this external reality, which is in turn transformed into a
subjective reality for them in a process known as mutual constitution.
The central importance in the use of identity within IR is the work of Alexander
Wendt, who applied sociologically based explanations to provide insights (and
critiques) of the international neo-realist/neo-liberal international structure, and
in the process transformed identity as a ‘viable variable’ of IR analysis. Wendt’s
1992 article ‘Anarchy is what states make of it’ broke new ground in raising
the profile of identities, but does not employ a historic perspective to explain the
origin or changing nature of identities; whilst not a priori, Wendt’s treatment
of identity is rather more categoric than conceptual. Identities are part of the insti-
tutional ‘portfolio’ that states carry and deploy in determining their interests
and policies with each other. Helpfully, Wendt suggests that states interact as
people, on the basis of meanings in an international system whose key structures
are intersubjective as well as material. He views identities and interests as socially
constructed, and state endowed with a limited degree of self-reference; but apart
from regarding the state as a corporate identity, views identities as instrumental
bearers of interests rather than constitutive and causal drivers of interests, policy and
ultimately behaviour.
Other forms of constructivism, particularly the more critical variants, are
less focused on the instrumental role played by values, norms and identities in
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IDENTITY
CONCLUSION
Identity is now at the stage of a semi-accepted variable in IR, one which comes
with complicated historical, sociological and cultural baggage, but which can no
longer be ignored (Hadfield, 2010). Two key developments have taken place. First
is the introduction of cultural themes as acceptable IR variables by key IR scholars.
As initially identified by Lapid and Kratochwil, the ‘ship of culture’ now seems
to be sailing more easily through IR waters (Hudson, in Lapid, 1996: 3) with the
effect that theories of state, and theories of foreign policy, both previously
content to utilize culture ‘as an explanation of last resort’, are now prepared to ‘move
forward in the study of cultural effect in foreign policy’, the construction of states,
and the analysis of state behaviour (Hudson, in Lapid, 1996: 3). The second is
the quiet but substantive growth of neoclassical realism. This is a new school of
thought that introduces a wider methodology (through the use of an intervening
variable), which allows scholars to capture many more historical, cultural and
social dynamics (including identity) in their analysis of state behaviour. First
identified and categorized in 1998 by Gideon Rose as a new canon of foreign
policy theories, subsequent analysis suggests that neoclassical realism uses both
systemic and domestic-level variables, but by ‘focusing expressly on domestic
dynamics to explain the external behavior of a state’ (1998: 146) can feasibly
200
IDENTITY
and persuasively include national identities and their various cultural and political
incarnations:
201
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INDEX
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245
INDEX
246
INDEX
Power and 125–126 Gibbon, Edward 30, 31, 39, 93, 129–130, 131,
Roman 128–132 135, 144
Russian 124, 138–141 Globalisation 114, 115, 130–131, 134
Spanish 121 Good Friday Agreement (1998) 70
English School 4, 8, 24, 76 Gorbachev, Mikhail 80, 140
Enlightenment 183; see also Machiavelli Gore, Al Jr. 80
‘Entente Cordiale’ 7 Gramsci, Antonio 4, 126
Ethiopia/ Eritrea 46, 57 Great Britain 44, 47–48, 50, 134–135
Ethnicity 156–157; see also Identity ‘Greater Britain’ 159–160
Etymology 96 ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ 85
EU (European Union) 114, 115–17, 118, 135, Greece 37–38, 45, 56, 97, 127–128, 180–181
143–144, 147, 156, 194–5 Green, T.H. 122
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World War II 23, 50 55, 65, 66, 69, 70, 86, 87–9, Yalta Conference 86, 167
110, 189 Yugoslavia 34, 58, 59
Allied Powers 86
Conferences 50–51, 86, 167 Zimmern, Alfred 24, 122, 157, 161, 163–164, 166
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